The following is an excerpt from a letter written by Dr. Ashok Gangadean on April 28, 2003 to David Dawson, Provost of Haverford College and Lyle Roelofs, Associate Provost.
Innovations in the Logic and Ethics of Global Reason
As you know I have been emphasizing that my teaching innovations are a direct co-expression of my research/scholarship: they mutually inform and transform each other. The classroom has been a primary research lab in which the innovations in my research have both emerged and been rigorously tested and experimentally developed over many years. And I believe the evidence shows that my Research/Teaching has made a most significant contribution to a newly emerging field of the Logic of Global Reason and Global Philosophy. I consider my research contributions to the clarification of Global Reason and the fundamental Global Logic to be innovations of the highest order.
And I believe that my teaching innovations in developing new well tested methods in the classroom for cultivating integral intelligence, global vision, for deeper critical thinking across and between diverse worldviews, for more effective rational skills and capacities for deep dialogue between widely diverse worlds and perspectives, for enhanced rational and hermeneutical capacities for global ethics across worlds...are likewise innovations of the highest order. So although the earlier submission focused on the two new courses I have I have introduced into the core curriculum in Philosophy – Global Wisdom and Global Ethics – I hope the focus will be on these new courses as both symbols and embodiments of the rational and hermeneutical innovations of global reason and global philosophy that pervade all of my courses, indeed, all of my professional activities.
I feel that my recent Annual Reports to the Provost have narrated and documented these themes in great detail. Whether through the two major volumes published in the past decade – Meditative Reason: Toward Universal Grammar and Between Worlds: The Emergence of Global Reason – or the many original essays published since, or the other major volumes which are about to appear – Meditations of Global First Philosophy: The Quest for the Missing Universal Logic of Logos (SUNY Press) and Time Truth and Logic: The Quest for a Global Logic (University Press of America)...I believe the cumulative evidence suggests that I have succeeded in making a key contribution as a pioneer in this emergent field.
I would like to stress also that my innovative teaching methods which embody this research and scholarship have been systematically and rigorously tested over the past decade in a wide range of contexts and performances well beyond the Haverford classroom.
My Reports and numerous supplements (including national video interviews) help to bring my teaching innovations – the technology and pedagogy of activating and awakening the global lens and the hermeneutical methods of processing texts, language, thought and experience in integrative ways... – out into the public sphere and public education. My Reports stress that I was moved to co–develop the Global Dialogue Institute as a teaching and research initiative to bring these innovations out to the world in the public marketplace of the global classroom:
i) We have seen how the teaching innovations were recognized (and celebrated) with one of the first national fellowships through ACLS – "Contemplative Mind in Higher Education" new initiative. I am attaching here some key supplements that bring out my teaching innovations in this context. (As you will see from these documents, the leaders of this important initiative in higher education use my innovations as a exemplar of their ideals, and turn to me as one of their primary advisors and consultants. In these supplements you will see that after three years of national fellows this initiative has grown remarkably and I include their recent Report to Fetzer Foundation which documents in great detail the struggles of faculty across the nation to bring such innovations into the core curriculum.
ii) I have pointed out how my teaching innovations were embodied in skills and dynamics of Deep Dialogue/Critical Thinking pedagogic processes which has ben adopted by the Ministry of Education and UNICEF in Indonesia in their attempts to renovate and reform the national educational program. I shared these documents with you earlier in the year indicating the success of the first one–year Pilot Project in five school districts in Indonesia. So my teaching innovations are having a potent impact in Indonesia as they seek to transform their educational life and educate global citizens for a global age.
iii) I have also shared earlier this year a copy of my – Missing Global Blueprint for Integral Education and Studies – which has been embraced by a wide range of colleagues all working to bring the skills of Integral Intelligence and global moral consciousness to the fore in higher education. This essay is being featured by Ex–Chancellor David Scott (U. of Mass.) in an anthology (Peter Lang Press) of kindred essays by about twenty leaders and pioneers in this transformative paradigm of liberal arts education. This essay, I believe, captures my teaching innovations well.
iv) I should mention also that my Reports have documented in great detail the wide range of Conferences, Workshops, Collaborations, and wide–ranging contexts in which my teaching methods have been presented and lab tested: in inter–religious dialogues with religious leaders around the globe, in the context of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality (which I co–convened and which brings eminent leaders together in deep dialogue retreats to model global dialogue and global ethics); civic leaders seeking creative ways to open and reconstitute the civic space for deep democracy in a pluralistic culture; peace activists and environmentalists seeking to help move our cultures to deeper global awareness of the roots of conflict and violence and the deep dialogue pathways to conflict resolution across polarized perspectives and transformations towards cultures of peace; in local high schools where the educational skills of deep dialogue are being embraced as vital for global citizenship and global responsibility; in local churches and religious fellowships where there is a keen interest in cultivating deeper common ground across religious worlds and in activating a more global perspective in religious life....etc.
v) And closer to home, in the past two years since the earlier submission to Elaine, I should also mention that I conceived and led the first Humanities Summer Institute (working with you, David, and other colleagues) in collaboratively developing the first trans–disciplinary Humanities Seminar which was passed through EPC and taught this Spring. I feel that my teaching innovations and hermeneutical methods made a significant contribution to this important development in the discourse of the Humanities.
vi) I am also attaching here in the supplements a copy of my recent essay – The Logos of Dao: The Primal Logic of Translatability – which will appear next month in Asian Philosophy – a high level journal published in the UK. This essay further captures an important aspect of my teaching innovations – showing how the hermeneutic of the global logic and global reason is able to bring out the deep foundations of translatability across widely variant worldviews and traditions...
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