Recently, I was asked several questions by a professor redesigning the program up at SFU. I decided to share my thoughts here. Please let me know what you think.

"From the student's perspective what is important? What 3 things would you recommend as being significant?"

1. Many years and many experiences lead me to say that the most significant “thing” a student can experience is an educator’s trust. Teachers of all sorts need to trust in the minds of their students and students need to feel that trust as a tangible reality in whatever learning environment they find themselves. It took me so long to learn to trust my own mind and my own perspective, to believe that I might have anything of any value at all to contribute to myself, others, or the world at large. I grew up knowing that I was stupid and that assumption failed to leave me even in grad school and lingers still. A significant element of that trust must also be about me as an inherently good person who is making the best possible decisions given the circumstances of my existence. I certainly went through school with the foundational understanding that me and my work simply weren’t good enough despite dealing with daily doses of trauma significant enough to tank just about anyone’s performance. When I made ‘bad’ decisions, I received very little empathy from those in power around me—including a teacher in high school who failed me in English for not turning in a paper on corruption when I had just ran away from home because I was facing my father in a court room for a felony charge for molesting me. Even after I explained to her why I couldn’t write the paper, she told me that I should have known to come to her before the paper was due and ask for an extension. Worse than the “F” on my transcript was the fact that she indicated, without question, that she didn’t think I was doing my best or working hard enough. A similar situation occurred to me in grad school when my brother was murdered and I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The institution failed to respond appropriately and compassionately despite medical documentation. Only, this time, the consequences were far more severe as I now have limited access to funding because my GPA has been irreparably damaged by a semester of “F’s.” The list of these kinds of stories stretches throughout many people’s experiences and through many time periods and cultures. Educators and administrators fail to trust in the student and the student internalizes that lack of trust and then finds themselves suddenly less capable of trusting themselves. Ostensibly, my argument looks like it’s about protecting the emotional well-being of individuals, and without a doubt, it is; however, it’s also about trusting students’ minds to learn and trusting in their ability to explore the world rather than inculcate them to seeking the “right” answer in the educator’s mind. Trust in oneself and one’s ability to ask interesting questions of the world seems a fundamental skill necessary to cultivate the twinned habits of inquiry and intellectual rigor as well as a drive/love of learning for its own sake.

2. Learning must be an aesthetic experience. It must pull us in; engage us, filling each of us with a sense of wonder in the world, ourselves and each other. We pile students into rooms devoid of beauty or the realities of human existence. We close the blinds and shut out their communities all the while telling them to prepare for “real life” on the outside. (One wonders what they are doing inside a classroom if not living?) We cut them off from the beauty of each other as well with our focus on evaluation and comparison and our constant “shhhhhhh.” How many teachers see their students as beautiful people with shining ambitions and altruistic intentions? Quite simply, all children are gifts to the world—we recognize that when they are so small that we feel compelled to count their fingers and toes yet forget that we are children of this world as well and that we are gifts as well. An adult, no matter how mature or how wise contains all the sorrows and joys of childhood. All dream to be inspired by great teachers and mentors, all of us want to be fed in ways that touch upon a child’s sense of wonder and joy as well as a child’s unambiguous distress over the pain in the world. Teachers, who grasp the concept of adult-as-child without infantilizing said adults, open possibilities for true aesthetic experience to occur in an educational setting. We are neither our capabilities/capacities nor are we our experiences but rather a true interdependent dialectic of both. It is this point of synthesis where education becomes an aesthetic endeavor striving to facilitate our increasing humanity and liberate us from the bonds of oppression, or those forces which pressure us to sacrifice our own or other’s autonomy and right to be.

3. My last criterion seems the most tenuous and least easily defended; and yet, I’m not sure it’s any less important. Comfort is important. I’ve never thought that comfort necessarily makes for lazy minds or complicity. Physical comfort, emotional comfort, psychological comfort all seem to be inextricably linked to safety, openness and a certain expression of vulnerability. When we are truly comfortable, all our needs have been met and we have the mental energy to explore and take risks rather than focus on those things which make us unpleasantly and painfully self-conscious. If I’m focused on my back aching or whether my bum is too big for a seat, I have less energy to focus on the work of a classroom. If I am concerned that the teacher or other students don’t like me, then I’m not as likely to take intellectual risks and brainstorm—my creative faculties will be inhibited and my critical faculties may reflect more my need for acceptance or saving face or pride than a true engagement with the topic at hand. My ability to stay open and curious about other students and the teachers’ thoughts might be inhibited or I simply may have less attention and miss significant aspects of others’ processes.

"What attitudes or behaviors or knowledge would be important in becoming an educated person? And how would you define an educated person? This could be a personaldefinition or a favorite one you have read or used in your world. A typicalexample would be Northrop Frye's definition of an educated person: One whois capable of understanding and being understood."

I think the primary attribute of an educated person is a questioning mind—but I mean something useful more than a simple act. We start off asking questions, “Mommy, why does the sun rise?” And then we are inundated with questions, “What is 4 times 6?” The questions we begin with are far more interesting than the more structured stuff we choke down in school. An educated person is the sort of person that can ask questions well. The way we educate people, questions are often perceived as aggressive or disrespectful; when really, education should be about helping us to formulate questions that are meaningful to us then coming up with strategies for exploring those questions. Instead, we are handed standardized test after standardized test and weighed and measured until our own sense of worth and value take a back seat to what administrators, teachers and peers think of us. A truly educated person knows the processes of knowledge and is driven by the question itself and knows their own value as one who engages in the acts of seeking and striving.