Steven C. Bauman

Big Questions of Vocation, Professional Identity, and Classroom Practice: A Conversation Between Colleagues  This paper—a collaborative effort with Teagle-Wabash Fellow and GTU colleague Melissa James—is one of four selected to address the theme “Where Religion Faculty Meet Students’ Worlds,” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Teaching Religion Section, Chicago, November 1-4, 2008.  I am very pleased to report that Helen Astin and Alexander Astin (UCLA) will be responding.  

 

Using words like “anguish,” struggle, and “isolation,” René Arcilla suggests that for today’s students “disorientation is a central feature” of their postmodern education (Arcilla, 2007, p. 19). As James Donahue notes, such “confusion and alienation” instigate “an intense search for security and definition” (Donahue, 1988, p. 326), which both writers observe ends in premature resolution of the “big questions.” This is, of course, highly problematic, as the premature closing off of possible futures restricts the scope of a student’s world, and consequently, inhibits engagement with bigger questions.

In this paper, Melissa James and I draw from work in our respective disciplines—Ethics and Social Theory (Melissa) and Religion and Psychology (Steven)—, our shared participation in the Teagle-Wabash Preparing Future Faculty Project, and subsequent combined interdisciplinary efforts, to offer our own unique insights into this problem and provide suggestions for possible remedies which take seriously the Astins’ challenge that ‘there is much more faculty and colleges can do to facilitate students’ spiritual development.’ (HERI, 2005) 

 

Key Points:

• Framing the conversation about spirituality and "Big Questions" in terms of "vocation," Melissa James offers various definitions of the concept in order to argue that vocation provides language to engage in questions of meaning and value in scholarship and teaching.
  

• Melissa James suggests that "big questions" are best addressed through the relationship between what bell hooks terms “engaged pedagogy” (hooks, 1994) which focuses on the holistic education of students and what Ernest Boyer calls “scholarship of application.” (Boyer, 1990).
  

• Applying the work of his Teagle-Wabash Project mentor—Kelly Bulkeley—in “spheres of wonder,” Steven Bauman imagines the potential for a pedagogical practice of wonder to stimulate a habit of “knowledge seeking curiosity” (Bulkeley, 2005,  p. 199), where exploration of neglected, repressed, or newly discovered “epistemological universes” (Beaudoin, 2003, p. 37), is unbounded.
  

• Drawing upon participation in this project, and work in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, Steven Bauman describes a faculty constructed learning environment, or “pedagogical container,” characterized by safety (Garbarino, 1995), solidarity, and high frustration tolerance (Ellis), which elicits conditions of flow (Csikszentmihalyi), thereby enabling learning as an autotelic experience—having advantages not only for classroom learning, but for student and faculty spiritual development as well.
  

• In the final section of this presentation, we offer a ‘conversation between colleagues’ on what we saw as the most portable insights from the Preparing Future Faculty program for development of future faculty. Particular attention is paid to the importance of interdisciplinary collegiality and (in) authenticity of faculty members.

 

Papers

• Emergence as Remedy in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Evolutionary Faith and Raimon Panikkar’s Theandric Ontonomy. Paper presented at the Religion & Social Sciences Section, American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Diego (November, 2007).

In this paper I investigate anthropological and teleological topoi addressed in the developmental psychology of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the religious philosophy of Raimon Panikkar. Our current situation is one of indisputable threat to human and planetary survival, and both authors propose “emergence” as the evident remedy to this crisis. 

I begin with a presentation of two visions of human nature offered by Csikszentmihalyi in his 1990 work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The first, characterized by boredom, anxiety, and disillusionment, he refers to as “psychic entropy.” The second, called “flow,” is drawn from research in positive psychology in general, and his study of optimal experience in particular. I continue with an examination of the phenomenology of flow and the conditions that elicit this shift in consciousness. I review arguments for selecting complexity over chaos, followed by discussion of the ensuing “autotelic self.” 

In section two, drawing from Csikszentmihalyi’s 1993 work The Evolving Self:  A Psychology for the Third Millennium, I review his claims for how culture (in general) and religion (in particular) once served to organize reality out of chaos but now no longer performs this function. A review of an investigation into the evolutionary past reveals an “Emergence of Complexity” that forms the principal dogma for Csikszentmihalyi’s “Evolutionary Faith.” I conclude this section with an examination of the teleological implications of an evolutionary faith in general, and the autotelic self in particular. 

In section three, I dispute Csikszentmihalyi’s claim that culture and religion are anachronistic through a presentation of key philosophical insights drawn from the work of Raimon Panikkar. I apply Panikkar’s “dialogical dialogue” to Csikszentmihalyi’s “conditions of flow” to reveal these as mutually compatible methods, which describe an essential interpersonal imperative along complementary pathways. I follow with an exploration of the anthropological ramifications of ensuing effects when both methods are applied simultaneously. Finally, I conclude this section with examples to illustrate what such pathways might look like in “real life.” 

In section four, I present both authors’ assessment of contemporary circumstances with their respective remedies. I discuss discrepancies between Csikszentmihalyi’s proposed “Evolutionary Faith” and Panikkar’s “Theandric Ontonomy.” Finally, I conclude with a comparative assessment of Csikszentmihalyi’s “Autotelic Self” and Panikkar’s “Cosmotheandric Intuition” and argue that both are necessary and advantageous.

• Religion & Psychology at the GTU:  Opportunities for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Scholarship. Paper presented at the Spring 2005 Series Faculty-Student Colloquium (S. Bauman, Chair), Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA (April, 2005).

• Dreaming and Community in a Troubled World. Paper presented at the Regional Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, John F. Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, CA (October, 2004).
  

 Presentations

• Intercultural Teaching and Learning at the GTU
  
  • August 2006
    
  • August 2005
  • August 2004

Professional Development

• Editorial Assistant, Pastoral Psychology, 2003 – Present

• Teagle-Wabash Winter Learning and Teaching Academy, January 2008

• Vocation, the Liberal Arts, Theology, and Teaching the “Big Questions”, Fall 2007

• Teagle-Wabash Summer Learning and Teaching Academy, August 2007

• Qualities of Mentors for Future Teaching Scholars, Spring 2007

• Dynamics of Teaching, GTU Professional Development Office, Spring 2005

• How to Punt a World Religions Survey Course, GTU Professional Development Office, Spring 2005