New White Paper: Can Bildung Solve the “Meaning Crisis”?
The Springboard Foundation for Whole Person Learning recently published its first White Paper, Distinctive Pedagogies that Address the “Meaning Crisis” in Higher Education, which explores the philosophies of Bildung as a foundational influence to modern microcolleges and living-learning institutes. See an introduction below, and download the full paper here.
The paper identifies unique pedagogical practices of microcolleges and living-learning institutes, and makes the case for three critical educational conditions that help young people create a durable sense of meaning and purpose across a lifetime: interdependence, work with real stakes, and an integrative relationship to place.
Introduction:
Intertwined with the well-documented mental health epidemic, young people are in the midst of what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the “meaning crisis”. They feel “disconnected from themselves, each other, and the world”. He describes this crisis as stemming from the loss of a dynamic correspondence between the individual and the collective, or the ‘agent’ and their ‘arena’. Essentially, this can be seen as a lack of relationship with community and place — some call it a collapse of context — that is leaving young people facing significant challenges to build lives of meaning and purpose.
Higher education, at the nexus between adolescence and adulthood, where so much sense-making of oneself and the world occurs, is the place many look to for solutions. This paper is about novel educational conditions and pedagogical practices being used in higher education that have promise to speak to the meaning crisis, and how they are practiced at four innovative programs; Seguinland Institute, Thoreau College, Outer Coast, and Tidelines Institute. Some self-define as microcolleges, and others as living-learning institutes. For the purposes of this paper we will use those terms interchangeably.
Living-learning institutes are founded on the conviction that a durable sense of meaning and purpose grows from the relationships you have with people and place, and (especially in a rapidly changing, and uncertain world) a sense of agency and self-efficacy to make change both in your own life and in the world. Essentially, that meaning isn’t ‘willed’ into existence, but stems from doing things of meaning within a particular community of people and environment. Co-founder of the living-learning institute, Seguinland, Philip Francis says: “It’s actually seeing your body do something concrete in the world. That is what gives your mind scaffolding to figure out what is meaningful. How we live is the ground floor from which meaning and purpose grow.”
Vervaeke names three main drivers of the meaning crisis: “[young people lack] shared goals or codes of conduct (alienation); their sense of themselves as a significant player with a rational purpose is destroyed (anxiety); any intelligible connection to the environment is gone (absurdity).”
Beyond the ‘happiness electives’ or Centers for Wellbeing typical in the approach of traditional higher ed, these institutes wager three distinct hypotheses — corresponding to each of Vervake’s three drivers above — about what educational conditions can truly move the needle for young people in the meaning crisis:
First, experiencing true interdependence in a community.
Second, practicing making effective change by working with real stakes, real people,
Third, developing a multi-dimensional relationship with place.
What pedagogical tools create these conditions? At what scholar of experimental colleges L. Jackson Newell calls the ‘electric edge’ of academe, microcolleges utilize student self-governance, labor, communal living, and place-specific academics as effective tools. These are practices that mark a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of higher ed — and yet have compelling power for student transformation. This paper explores the specific mechanisms, structures, and systems of these pedagogies and communicates how they work to create the conditions described above.
These programs reimagine school spaces as small-scale living-learning environments, or communities of practice. They “serve as incubators where the promise of how we can live, learn, recognize, and care for each other [becomes] a reality on a small scale… [and they] inspire learners to understand themselves as capable changemakers.” Chris Higgins, the preeminent researcher on formative education and student meaning-making, calls for higher ed to adopt the baseline design choices that are the hallmark of microcollege environments, which he names as the “absorption [of students] into a living community of learning, one defined both by its scale and its materiality.” Small scale: an environment small enough that students are integral to the affairs of the operation, which allows them to feel their utility and necessity to the whole — an intuitive sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. A size where they can “easily see their actions, or inactions, make a difference”. Materiality: an environment where students are given ownership over choices of consequence to a real community, so that the quality and outcome of their engagement matters.
These models do work on many levels to create the conditions for students to feel that they matter. Mattering is to both add value for others, and to feel valued by others… a feeling that lies at the intersection of power and responsibility, and is critical to the formation of meaning and purpose.
Ruth Asawa, the modernist artist, whose higher education at Black Mountain College, a famous experimental project in education in North Carolina, describes this model of living-learning environments as a way to create coherence between schooling and living. She says that “Black Mountain College taught me that there is no separation between studying, performing the daily chores of living, and creating one’s own work.” Higgins affirms that “in the end… to learn is to live ideas.” Microcollege structures allow students to ‘live ideas’ as the main medium of their education. They leave with real repositories of times that they exercised agency, rose to the occasion, and made material differences in people’s lives, and with authentic relationships built on labor and care. Said best in the words of novelist Haruki Murakami, it’s an education based in “a steady accumulation of small realities” rather than just “words and promises.”
Experiences at living-learning institutes spur lasting impact for students across a lifetime:
By living in a place where everyone has a responsibility to everyone else, and every person is essential to the function of the whole… How does that change the way students understand their responsibilities to their larger concentric circles of community?
When you are given ownership over your surroundings, and must be an agent rather than a passive participant in making effective change on a small scale… How does that inform the way students step up to meet the looming challenges of our times?
By experiencing a place where you are completely integrated with the land you are on, the ecosystems you are in, and the resources of your environment… How does developing a deep cultural, historical, and ecological knowledge of a specific place enable students to build rich contexts wherever they go next?”
Supporting the development of meaning and purpose for young people is inherently valuable. But the natural outcome of this sort of education is equally as significant: leaders that are ready to meet and solve for the colliding crises of our time — of governance and democracy, justice and equality, and climate and environment.
In sum, these educational conditions and pedagogies are opening up spaces for young people to practice different ways of meaningful living. The late Dr. Sol Neely (a teacher and scholar of political philosophy and Indigenous Studies, and founding faculty at microcollege Outer Coast) would call them spaces that allow us “to imagine otherwise.” It’s the one demand he made of his students in every class: to be open to the possibilities of worldbuilding beyond the constraints of what they already knew and saw. This, in essence, these institutions seek to do, too. To crack open our current conceptions of what is possible for a school and, by extension, the world — to be.
If you would like to know more about bildung, feel free to join the Global Bildung Network: https://www.globalbildung.net/
