Captain Ruter asked me to post some of my stories and impressions here. I'm one of two Southwestern faculty in London this semester with the Captain and 18 other SU students. Two additional faculty also teach SU students -- an Englishman who is a long time teacher of British Life and Culture, and a young American writer who studied at Oxford is teaching theater."Learning" in our program is quite holistically understood. In addition to classroom time
(what students typically consider their "education"), various configurations of students are constantly on the move. Last week alone, I know about a field trip to Whole Foods London (the corporate headquarters is in Austin and so to see the store's entrance into the European market offered interesting contrasts), a modern interpretation and performance of Oedipus at the National Theater (the classic play drew on modern costumes and a male chorus reminiscent of ancient times) , a night time ceremony at the Tower of London (where guards have ceremoniously and relatively privately closed the tower nightly for 700 years), a trip to East Putney to learn from the Imam at the London Mosque and to be guests at a delicious meal, a local musician who came to our school building to talk about and
play a wide variety of music (followed of course by an outing to the pub for conversation), and a risk management officer still employed by Lehman Brothers in London coming to explain elements of the worldwide credit and banking crisis. And these are only the activities I attended.Outside of classes this week, I also joined a Southwestern alum and her husband to see a special Mark Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern museum (a modern artist whose work I first met when I studied in London during college), went on a Ghost Walk of east end pubs with locals I met in a community education course, and saw a documentary film about Liverpool called Of Time and the City. I also did daily life things like going to the local gym, food shopping at the grocery store and produce shopping at a local market, and staying current on my reading. Life
is very full here, in quite a diverse way.Between classes and on outings, I enjoy deeper conversations with students. At our home campus, we each seem to move so quickly from class to class that we often miss reflection time together. Here, we have conversations about what we're seeing and learning and wondering. For example, as we walked back to the train from the Mosque visit, several students and I had a long conversation about the paradigm that must exist within the Imam's world such that he could have such clarity about ideas we considered old fashioned (such as gender construction and roles for women in society). Getting our minds around that, and staying out of a judgmental place, took nearly the entire walk. Along the way, two of us noticed that we had hesitated from asking about terrorism -- we could not even get our minds around what we actually wanted to know. We had both been relieved when the British Life and Culture teacher asked the Imam about life for Muslims today in light of Muslim
extremists' violence. And then of course, we needed to make sense of the Imam's responses. But meaning making is so often non-linear. On the train home, a student asked me if I might advise her on how to become more diplomatic in communications and how to coach others to be so. That quickly led to another student expressing an interest in the field of teaching and learning and her own fear that she might too quickly make assumptions about others. And then we found ourselves relating back to an in-class discussion about "elegant power" and the negative perceptions some people from "third world" countries have about American foreign policy and our approaches to economic development. Which of course, the week before the American presidential election, led us to talk about the elections and the policies and the the process of voting, our own assumptions about participatory government contrasted with the underlying assumptions held by some other countries where citizens follow rather than participate. There seems no end to the magnificent loops and links we can knit even between our actual official outings.Willis Harman's Global Mind Change, a book several students and I have read for one of my courses here, calls what we are doing
"paideia" -- the Greek concept as "a society in which learning, fulfillment, and becoming human are the primary goals and 'all its institutions [are] directed to this end...Education was not a segregated activity, conducted for certain hours, in certain places, at a certain time of life. It was the aim of the society" (p. 142-143). In Greek society, "Paideia was education looked upon as a lifelong transformation of the human personality, in which every aspect of life plays a part. It did not limit itself to the conscious learning processes, or to inducting the young into the social heritage of the community. Paideia meant the task of making life itself an art form, with the person the work of art" (p.170).
I am clear that paideia is happening among us here in London this semester. Each student (and each faculty) will have his and her own narrative about how that occurred or what he or she "did" while in London, but it is the sum of the experiences (not the least of which are the spaces in between "the" experiences!) and the relationships -- with each other, with people we meet here, and with how our relationships shift with those at home when we return -- that seems to most characterize the learning of studying abroad.
I hope each Southwestern student -- and all students everywhere -- take the opportunity to paideia.
Many thanks to all who are making this experience possible, for me and for each of us -
Dr. Neville
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