JULY 25, TUESDAY

LEARNING THROUGH FEELING ALONG

A third thing that Entangled Life and Fantastical Fungi makes me wonder about is how we learn, or actually, how I learn. After being a student or a teacher for much of my life my experience of how I learn and how some of my students learn is different from the academic model that I experienced in school, myself, and the way that my fellow teachers thought. I have always been out of step.

But the notion that the “wide wood web” of fungal connections is in many ways like a giant brain with all of its connections or the wide world Internet web with all of its connections seems to link to how I learn.

Fungi are communicating constantly and are making decisions constantly. They can communicate across great distances, they can allocate resources to differnt plants, they can develop protections and ways of supporting other life, they can even feel their way through a maze. These connections of mycelium seem to be functioning as almost giant computers.

But it seems to me that they are not conscious, they are driven by a process of feeling along and make decisions by feeling along. There is something within fungi, within all living beings that impels them (us) along, a driving life process from birth to death in which the organism is impelled about by genes and a life force. And it seems to me in my own experience that I am driven along in the same way. I have certain intense ways of responding to the world that pulls me along. Writing is one of them. There are certain things that turn me on and certain things that turn me off. I have very little control over either one. In addition I have a storehouse of experience embedded within me, things that I tried which caused pain or immobilized me, things that I tried which brought delight and energized me. I am guided mainly by my own experience but I also have empathy and feel the experiences of my fellow humans through their stories. I have both my own built in genetic life force and my own experience and the experience of other people to guide me, even to drive me along.

Academic teaching and learning is a different process. Here knowledge is categorized within academic disciplines which are the conventions academics have develope in which what is most real is the knowledge, often abstract knowledge that through rigorous analysis everyone in the discipline, world wide, agrees upon. This is objective knowledge and we can learn these systems of knowlege in the same way we learn the conventions of our culture. We have built vast systems of knowledge in this way. This is what we are taught in school, in grade school and in college.

At the same time as we are learning agreed upon systems of knowledge in class we are feeling our way along through social experience, through listening to ourselves and to others outside of class.

These two ways of learning are connected to the two sides of us, the objective understanding side and the subjective feeling along through experience side. They are both important.

I have faith in objective academic understanding and believe in facts as being what is real in an actual way. In that way I am a rigorous academic.

But that is not what motivates me or impels me through life. What drives me is my own emotional experience and the emotional experience of others. To me much of academic learning seems to be rote learning, memorizing the disciplines that others have built and fitting into the conventions of an academic discipline.

The most intense learning from me is learning through experience. This is why travel is so important to me. It dislocates the assumptions made by my own culture and opens me up to new possibilities. This comes as much through the body as the mind, through walking and talking and eating and experiencing a wide variety of things. It comes not through lectures but through feeling my way along through the experience of cultures different from my own. It comes through journal writing in which I explore my own experience and through classroom discussions in which I listen to the experience of others. It is often not a conscious process but an unconscious process. It cannot be tested or graded and often you don’t know what the impact of experience is until years later. That is why I believed that listening to people was more important than evaluating them. It is why I believed that dropping students into intense experiences and letting them feel their way through was more important than lecuring them on the agreed academic facts about the culture. It is why after eight weeks of intense experiences in Sri Lanka and India I insisted they travel on their own and figure things out for themselves for the next eight weeks. It is why when I read people’s personal journals, their personal experience, I would respond with long personal responses from my own personal experience.

I was out of step with academic learning. My classes had academic subject titles because that was the standard for academic learning. Intercultural Communication. Introduction to South Asia. But we didn’t cover the subject or test on it. We learned through experience, through listening to ourselves and through listening to each other.

If every teacher had done this the system would have collapsed, academic credits would have dissolved, students would have stopped paying for academic credit. But every teacher didn’t and from other teachers students got a rigorous academic training. I just focused on the other side of learning, learning through emotional experience, because I thought this was equally important and more than that, this was the way that I learned most intensely and was the only way I could share what mattered most to me. Many students preferred this way of learning in any case so there were few complaints.

But I always felt out of step and vulnerable, almost as if I was undermining the academic conventions that all my colleagues believed in so strongly. I certainly didn’t advertise what I was doing or try to suggest it to others.

But when I see the example of the ways that fungi feel their way along and share in the process of feeling along without conscious awareness I have more the feeling that I have always been in step with this way that much of life on earth feels its way along.