Thank you all for being here on this first installment of Laker Club Talks. This series is the brainchild of President Mantella who wanted to create additional opportunities for all of us to get together and to engage in conversations outside of our formal structures.

When the idea of this talk series came about, one thought that had been simmering in my mind is imagination. It kept popping up in different contexts. One of these contexts is the empowered education. What do we want to empower our students to do?

For me, as I mulled the idea, the one formulation I settled on is this: “we want to empower them to imagine, design, and create new systems. Systems that are fully aligned with their values and their aspirations. We want them to imagine and then create new futures.”

And then I came across this quote by Whitehead, mathematician, philosopher, professor, and a number of other things. He talks about the joy that comes from teaching and learning.

“A university is imaginative, or it is nothing – at least nothing useful … A university which fails [to impart information imaginatively] has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energizing as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes.” (Whitehead, 1929, p 17)

The fact that Whitehead was a mathematician, and a philosopher, an educator, and writer, is no accident to me. There is magic, or completeness that happens when we combine the analytic and the esthetic, the doing and the dreaming, the action oriented and the reflection oriented.

And the reality is that education has forever been soul-searching for its true mission and for the right mix. Many education thinkers argue, and rightly so, that too often we erred on the side of the analytic at the expense of the esthetic, the doing at the expense of the dreaming. One such thinker is Sir Ken Robinson. Most of his writing and speaking has been about the need to evolve education from the industrial age to our times demanding different skills, different dispositions, and different values.

Among other things he has been arguing that education has been killing children’s innate capacity for imagination and innovation. In his book Out Of Our Minds, he tells one of his favorite stories.

A 1st grade teacher one day notices that this kid in the back, who usually never pays attention, is so engrossed during their drawing period. So, intrigued, the teacher walks back to her and asks what are you drawing? The girl answers “a picture of God” the teacher responds, “but nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl responds, “they will in a minute.”

The fearlessness! The self-confidence! The trust in her imagination to create something that she knows of conceptually!  

That is the imagination skill that we are all born with but tend to temper through our learning and schooling.  Some of the tempering is for good reason. As Whitehead says, imagination needs also to be grounded in reality. And that is important.

Imagination is extremely important and valuable at all times. But imagination is more so at times of rapid change, at times when many of our systems are disrupted. At times when we are faced with challenges where doing more of the same or better of the same won’t do.

The fact of the matter is that we are still operating with an educational system that is the byproduct of enlightenment. The enlightenment gave us faith and reliance on science and technology more than anything else. Science from the enlightenment is primarily reductionist. Systems are understood through understanding their parts. It is primarily short term. Actions lead to effect without delay, and in a deterministic fashion. Science from the enlightenment primarily binary. We appreciate certainty, black and white, unique answers and feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. We are uncomfortable with ambiguity and tend to rush to eliminate it.

The educational system of the enlightenment is also, more subtly so, rooted in the value system of 300 years ago.  And this is reflected in our disciplines and curricula. For example,

One of the main learning outcomes of every university curriculum is CRITICAL THINKING.

Critical thinking is what allows us to question, to verify, to ascertain, reject, to deconstruct. It is a very important competence. But it is also much more than a competence. It is a mindset.

Our STEM disciplines are so rooted in critical thinking that it becomes an integral part of the ethos of its professionals. We instill in our students logico-deductive reasoning, linear moves from causes to effects, and logic deduction supported by observation and evidence.

We train them to be detached, discerning, and critical so that they can penetrate, understand, and make use of the natural phenomena of the world in which we live.

At times when we are faced with unique existential challenges, we need more than the tools to critique the failings of the past. We need more than the tools to navigate the current systems. We need more than the tools to fix the current systems. We need to imagine different futures. Higher Education institutions have always been the places for futuring.

At times when we are in a steady state with continuous progress, our role is to help our graduates find their place in these systems. At times when we socio-intellectual infrastructures are squeaking and squeaking very hard threatening to collapse, futuring is imagining new systems and new infrastructures. Futuring is not assuming that what has always been must always remain. Futuring is opening the mind for possibly different organizations, different social contracts, different relationships, and different systems.

And this is where the CRITICAL THINKING competence must be accompanied with IMAGINATION.

In addition to discerning and analyzing, we also need to be suspend our negativity every once in a while and IMAGINE. IMAGINE new realities, new relationships, new organizations, new contracts, new time horizons.

Notice that I repeatedly used imagination rather than innovation.

Imagination in my mind goes much farther beyond innovation. Innovation has been co-opted, narrowed down, overused, and commercialized.

Also, I used imagination rather than problem solving. This is another competency that is so revered in STEM. Problem solving is much more narrow than imagination. Problem solving is the last step after we have identified (or accepted) all assumptions. Problem solving is the last steps when we already posed (a good) question and focused all our energy at answering that question.

Again, the idea here is not to replace critical thinking with imagination but to put them together. Anke Schittay puts it beautifully in her book Creative Universities framing the concept of a critical-creative pedagogy:

“a ‘critical-creative pedagogy’ that does not abandon critique but complements it with creativity. Rather than just teach students to deconstruct, this pedagogy can also inspire them to rebuild. Rather than just teach students to take apart, it can also foster their capacities to put together again, in radically new ways. Rather than just teach students to understand the legacies of the past and the failings of the present, it can also encourage them to imagine possible alternative futures.”

So this is my take on empowered education:

“we want to empower our students to imagine, design, and implement new systems. Systems that are fully aligned with their values and their aspirations. We want them to imagine and then create new futures.”