Heesoon Bai

Re‐searching and re‐storying the complex and complicated relationship of biophilia and bibliophilia

This article is a collaborative bricolage of poetry, autobiographical fragments, essay pieces, and images assembled together as a portrait of the authors’ ongoing existential, psychological and epistemological struggles as educators and learners, parents and children. The article captures a reflective exploration and collective sharing of their own life experiments, seeking to create ripples of provocation as well as resonation in the reader. Identifying biophilia (love of life/nature) as a key learning in environmental education, this work looks into the complex and complicated relationship between biophilia and bibliophilia (love of books). The article ends by identifying indwelling experience as key to biophilia, and suggests and advocates poetry‐making and story‐telling as methods for fostering indwelling.

Reclaiming Our Moral Agency through Healing: A Call to Moral, Social, Environmental Activists.

This paper makes the case that environmental education needs to be taken up as a moral education to the extent that we see the connection between harm and destruction in the environment and harm and destruction within human individuals and their relationship, and proceeds to show this connection by introducing the key notion of human alienation and its psychological factors of wounding, dissociation or split, self and other oppression and exploitation, all of which result in compromised moral agency. To this end, the paper further makes the case that we need to replace the culture of alienation with a culture of healing and reclamation of fundamental humanity manifest as compassion and wisdom, and presents an ideal of moral agency that would emerge when all parts and dimensions of one’s being—body–mind–heart–energetics—are aligned, attuned and integrated, having healed from the body–mind split, mind–heart split, body–spirit split and mind–matter split. Concepts and imagery borrowed from Asian philosophies, such as Buddhism and Daoism, are offered as illustrative resources for the project of reclaiming uncompromised moral agency and its manifestation through compassion and wisdom. These concepts include hungry ghosts, bodhicitta, sunyata and wu-wei.

Intercultural Philosophy and the Nondual Wisdom of ‘Basic Goodness’: Implications for Contemplative and Transformative Education

Radical personal and systemic social transformation is urgently needed to address world-wide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid, unprecedented global destruction of our environment. Recent years have seen an embrace of intersubjectivity within discourse on educational transformation within academia and the public sphere. As well, there has been a turn toward contemplative education initiatives within North American schools, colleges and universities. This article contends that these turns might benefit from openness to the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the ‘wisdom traditions’ from which many contemplative practices are drawn. To illustrate this point, we discuss the value of intercultural philosophy of education, and introduce Eastern philosophical ideas, specifically, the Shambhala Buddhist notion of the nondual ground and wisdom of basic goodness and related teachings. We detail how awareness of basic goodness and its holistic expression in the ground, path, and fruition of Shambhala teachings can open vital questions regarding intersubjectivity, challenge and reinvigorate aspects of current engagements with contemplative practices, and provide significant insights and educational paths for transformational endeavours in neoliberal times. Informed by our learning from Shambhala, we conclude with a deepened understanding of intercultural philosophy of education.

Recalibration of Mindfulness for Education

In this chapter, we the authors critically examine how mindfulness is taken up in education, and attempt to re-alibrate its use in education so as to suggest better ways to work with what mindfulness practice is truly capable of: liberating humanity from the narrow and limiting confines of reified ego consciousness and its perpetual condition of schism and conflict, internal and external.

The Circle of Leadership Integrity Within Business Organizations

In recent times, the economic crisis and associated meltdowns of companies have contributed to an increasingly negative perception of business and industry. Numerous corporate scandals and failures have motivated people to ask questions about the leaders at the forefront of these organizations, and about their integrity. The public is losing trust in leaders who are not putting their words into practice. In short, the integrity of leadership has been called into question, and integrity is considered one of the values most important to the practice of leadership (O’Toole, 1995; George, 2007; Carroll, 2007; Fairholm, 2001).

Developing the Artistry of Teaching

I am privileged to be part of a group of educators who are exploring the place of inner work in our pedagogical practice. Different threads connect me to the members of the group—interests in the arts, creativity, and exceptional human accomplishments, dedication to students and to teaching, and longstanding respect. Our paths have converged in different ways, at different times, always with pleasure in the convergence. One shared belief is that inner work is different for all of us but especially for educators.

Environmental Ethics as Applied to Outdoor Physical Practices: An Analysis Through the Lens of Hans Jonas

Abstract In times of social and moral crises, sport has often been called to boost individual moral development. By the same token, outdoor activities are viewed as good educational practices to enhance environmental responsibility. However, the present paper argues that these physical activities are currently following the same technological development trend as the mainstream society, and challenges this trend itself in terms of sustainability by critically asking this question: Do outdoor activities really enhance environmental responsibility? The research supporting this paper is based on a qualitative inquiry using interviews with outdoor activities practitioners: mountain guides and white water sports instructors. The findings of this research show that environmental responsibility development depends on the sport contexts. It is fostered in slow and none-technological activities (e.g. trekking) and lowered in fast and technological activities (e.g. canoeing, kayaking). The paper concludes with the following paradox reached by the preliminary research results: the birth of modern technology calls for greater need of environmental responsibility, but it may also prevent its development at the same time.

Mindfulness for adulting

ABSTRACT This paper calls for ethical responsibility to manifest a holistic, embodied, and deeply relational vision of what it means to actualise fuller human flourishing than how we, humanity as a whole, are behaving currently. A thesis is presented that humanity is experiencing an arrest within the trajectory of species’ psychological development and that mindfulness cultivation can facilitate transformation. This thesis comes with a proviso that mindfulness needs to be taken up differently from the dominant discourse around it. A case is made that contemporary mindfulness is most often implicitly and explicitly fuelled by conventional “ordinary consciousness” whose primary function is survival supported by the fear-driven fight–flight–freeze neural assemblage. Suggestions are made that mindfulness be understood as a way of accessing non-ordinary consciousness that sees the world relationally in terms of expansive self-other integration. For this, further suggestions are made that mindfulness be placed back into a larger context, for example, practice-based Buddhist philosophy and psychology, that addresses existential suffering and proffers a comprehensive holistic educational programme. Such a programme cultivates human potential and supports relationally generous and generative human flourishing. As a concrete practice proposal for transitioning into a relational paradigm, inner work is proposed and illustrated with examples.

Meditation on Wittgenstein and Education

This chapter is composed of a series of writing fragments that functions as personal meditations on various themes in Wittgenstein’s work as they find resonance in this author’s professional and personal life: as educational philosopher, educator, and psychotherapist. These themes focus on human suffering induced by being captured in reification of discursive thoughts and propositional knowledge claims, including knowledge claims based on seeing ourselves as predominantly causality bound . In commenting on numerous passages from Wittgenstein’s works, possibilities of human liberation are sought through seeing ourselves anew as beings capable of exercising human freedom and responsibility . Along the way, nuanced and critical clarifications are made about the distinction between desire and craving, and between fulfillment and satisfaction; instrumental reason serving causality-bound thinking; learning that cultivates sensibility and judgment; Wittgensteinian’s pedagogy that resists objectification of students; critical importance of ethics and aesthetics to human liberation and flourishing; and interconnectedness, or unity, of philosophy, therapy, and education when seen through Wittgensteinian’s lens.

Ethical-Ecological Holism in Science Pedagogy: In Honor of Sea Urchins

In this chapter, we explore the unquestioned use and killing of animals in biological education, through a mixed-methods study involving narrative inquiry, poetic inquiry, and essay composition. Based on our results, we call for a shift to a more ethical-ecological holistic framework for science pedagogy. We argue that, for this shift to occur, we need to critically re-examine the foundational philosophical basis of, as well as accompanying psychological work that goes into, the de-animated and desacralized empiricist worldview. We also propose to re-animate, and to reclaim a sacred perception of, the world through aesthetic and contemplative practices alongside scientific investigations.