I sent out my application to Simon Fraser’s new PhD in Philosophy of Education program yesterday.  here’s my letter of intent:

 

Dear Dr. Bai and Other Faculties in the Phil of Ed Program:

I am immensely excited about the Philosophy of Education program because the students and faculty I have met, and who are involved in the program, demonstrate a passion for transforming education and cultural consciousness.  My personal and professional work resonates strongly with this passion.  The intention of this letter is to offer a sense of my experience, the deep questions that have emerged out my experience, and the reasons for wanting to seriously pursue these questions with your guidance at the doctoral level.

Many important seeds were sown during the last two years of my undergrad at McMaster University.  A friend called on me in the fall of 2002 and asked how we could get more students and faculty on bicycles.  We entered in a deep phase of visionwork about a service that could prompt a major shift in consciousness about sustainability.  A modest basement office looking onto a sunken, open terrace slowly became a bicycle repair co-operative.  A stand, tools on the wall, some knowledgeable student mechanics and Otis Redding on vinyl set the context for a philosophy in action: “Learn, in an intimate way, how to repair and care for your bicycle, and change how you engage with the world”.  A trickle became a stream of students coming through the doors of MACycle Co-op, many of them expecting to drop off their broken bikes and return later.  Instead, we put aprons on people and handed them wrenches.  An informal class would begin as the mechanic engaged in a hands-on conversation about the bicycle as a system with an elegant purpose and logic to its design.  Others working on their own bicycles listened in and slowly the shop became a rich learning environment where it was often difficult to know who was running the show because the distinction between teacher and learner was blurred.

The co-operative inspired me to become an educator and after graduation in 2004, I returned to the Bachelor of Health Sciences program where I offered support for inquiry-based learning courses. Del Harnish, the Associate Dean of the programme and my closest mentor over the past eight years, gave me a book called Edgeware:  Complexity Science for Health Care Managers.  The book triggered an intellectual upheaval and I started seeing everything around me as a complex adaptive system.  I could see fractals in the forest behind the university.  The twenty-person samba percussion orchestra I played with became a study in community and the ecology of music.  I viewed the bicycle repair co-operative as a non-linear, self-organizing system. It was as a student mentor that I began to develop my agency for inviting others to play with the metaphors that frame our thinking. 

I went on to pursue an MA at OISE/UT in 2005 and created a fourth-year undergraduate course at McMaster on Complex Adaptive Systems, the central focus of my thesis.  Over the three years of running the course, my personal journey of healing and transformation shaped how I engaged with my students.  A ten-day Buddhist meditation retreat in 2006 helped me to nurture a strong, daily sitting practice.   Meditation has helped me listen to my students and myself with compassion and unconditional regard.  Intensives in Contact Improv dance and in Theatre of the Oppressed taught me invaluable skills for going deeper into our physical and emotional being and acting with spontaneity.  In the past year I entered into study with a Daoist Sifu and have been developing a committed practice in qi gong, tai chi, and yoga.  I have started to feel how the Daoist concept of qi, or life force, manifests in the classroom and I am learning how to cultivate and move qi with others.  As well, I believe very strongly in developing my writing practice and I have become more involved in the dialogue on complexity and consciousness in education through my scholarship and presentations at academic conferences.

I feel very much at the beginning of a path and what brings me to apply to this program are the cultural, philosophical, psychological, environmental, and political questions that extend beyond myself.  I want to look more deeply into my practices experientially and philosophically through a synthesis with these bigger questions.  I want to expand how I am a reflection of what is and what is possible.  There are two broad questions that I want to pursue:

1.     Why is so much of modern education premised in patriarchal systems of thought that privilege abstract knowledge over experiential knowing?  I see a traumatizing schism in the social and individual psyche that denies us the capacity to fully attend to our human experience.  This program will enable my understanding of the historical, political and cultural context of education in our society. I want to identify how these contexts bring about oppression and violence in individuals, groups, and on the environment.  My methodology in this phase will involve a literature review and conceptual analysis of the works of Erich Fromm, Richard Tarnas, Jacques Derrida, Ken Wilber, John Ralston Saul, and Henry Giroux amongst others although my intuition tells me that Sean Blenkinsop and his work on existential and ecological philosophy will strongly influence the particular route I take.  My goal in opening up this question is to show why and where the imbalance between knowledge and knowing exists and what the personal and social consequences of this imbalance are.

2.     How can educators and educational institutions tend to the common-ground of knowledge and knowing?  Insights gleaned from pursuing the first question will help me in mapping out how being-oriented philosophies that work towards the transformation and healing of human consciousness are taken up by educators.  I am interested in what I and other educators can do in order to bring ourselves into presence with our students and bring harmony to the knowledge/knowing imbalance.  My methodology will largely be driven by a qualitative study of my lived experience working as an educator with undergraduate students. Focus will be placed on challenging encounters with other educators, mentors, students, and nature to reveal the capacity for inner and outer medicines to bring about change and liberation from suffering.  I will engage my practices of qi gong and mindfulness meditation as portals into my personal reflections on becoming an educator and my exploration of Daoist texts such as the Daodejing, and the works of Parker Palmer, Roxanna Ng, Max van Manen, and Krishnamurti.  I look forward to the possibility of apprenticing with Heesoon Bai as her work in complexity, ethics, Buddhist and Daoist philosophy resonate strongly with my questions.

My aim in pursuing these questions is to not only make the case that we need to change how we think about and ‘do’ education, but to use the research process itself to show we can attend to the experience of transforming consciousness and what it feels like along the way.  It is my ambitious intent, during and beyond graduate studies, to use this work as a platform for creating courses/workshops, a research program and an organization or centre that supports the development and integration of being-oriented philosophies and practices into teacher education and classrooms.   

Thank you for considering my application.

Sincerely,

 

 

Sean Park, M.A.