Hi folks,
I would like to thank Sherto for her wonderful work.
I have been thinking, since we last met in Ifrane, about some effective ways of helping the students at the tertiary level to transform themselves, and would appreciate your feedback.
This is how I have started the semester with one class:
I am aware that what may work in the context where I teach (the university of Fes, Morocco) may not yield the same results in a different context.
I have started with helping the students to know themselves better, as students, males, females, who belong to a certain age group, have a certain culture, come from a certain social background, etc. They need to know who they are before they can experience self-change. Self-knowledge before self-transformation, or perhaps they mean the same thing?
The are currently doing some reading about issues of identity.
The next step is to assign some reading material that might inspire a slow and effective transformation. I do not know yet what to assign (articles, essays, short stories, maybe?)
The course I teach is Public Speaking and not a course in Transformative Education. I am aware about some of the ways I can use the course to further their knowledege about themselves. However, I do not want to do that at the expence of the course.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Lahcen
Lynn,
Thanks for your feedback.
The semester didn't go as I'd hoped. My transformative efforts in fact attracted little attention; my insistence that students should rather know themselves before they could undergo transformation seem to have turned some of them into adopting (rather progressive) political positions, such as that the government should do this and that for the socially underprivileged populations, environment, etc.
In other words, I generally aimed at helping the students know themselves and know how to choose what they want and what they would think could enhance their personal development and be at the same time congruent with societal needs and in the benefit of humanity. What I got in return was few of them interrupting my class, now and again, to boast their eagerness to militancy (mainly within the civil society) to improve their social conditions.
I am not sure whether this is the beginning of their transformation.
After all, who is a transformed individual? a humanist? a person striving for peace and love? a progressivist who defends the poor, an ecologist, a feminist, etc.none of these or all of these?
Any thoughts?
Hi, Lahcen
I'm sorry I reply so late. You might end your term by now. But my new life needs adjustments that make me quite away from this interesting topic of discussion.
Anyway, I definitely agree that self-knowledge comes before self-transformation. There is no such "transformation" from something you are blind of. However, in my opinion, reading books could not help that much for people to transform themselves. And based on my personal experiences, using the things that are close to our daily life is more useful.
I like to spend a good time to chat with people on the street who are not even aware of what university is, say a worker in construction building, a burger sales, an old lady shopping in a food store, etc. Here I mean a real good time of chatting. If I put all my senses and my attention to the chat, there is always something I learn from them. And it could be that I learnt more about myself than I learnt about them.
My point is.. why can't we work our senses within our closest neighborhood first, before reaching a "big thing" like politics? Maybe, just a suggestion, if you could make a "sudden and random pair" of students and let them talk about themselves to their pair openly, and later questioned them about what they learnt about themselves from the talk (and not about their pair), then they would know what it meant by self-knowledge and later.. self-transformation.
I wonder how old your students are and what background that they most come from. It must be very fun to work with them. I hope this helps.
Enjoy..
nuri,-