Transgression

When we commit ourselves as educators to inculcating personal and social responsibility in our students and seek to discover if we have been successful in this endeavor, we really do need approaches that transcend philosophical, religious, economic and political boundaries, that start from where people already are and includes them in an active process of examination, critique and change. This is a lot more than adding another ethics course to the curriculum. It is modeling exactly how we want such responsibility to permeate our students' lives. If the questions of ethical responsibility don't infuse our own work, how can expect them to influence our students? The saying “be the change you want to see in the world” is not just something we teach our students, is it? It is a challenge to our professional and personal selves.

The challenge, I argue, has three parts, movements if you will, which comprise the transdisciplinary perspective and practice necessary for dealing with, for example, the complexity of ethics and sustainability. The problems of sustainability cannot be sufficiently addressed, nor can the ethical complications be resolved, without a transdisciplinary approach. In effect, we must adopt the ethos of transdisciplinarity if we wish to create an ethic of sustainability. I'll address each in this and two subsequent postings.

The first movement is to understand transdisciplinarity as transgression; a refusal to privilege any particular discipline, culture or form of knowledge, especially one that excludes social and personal values. Disciplinary experts and community members must be involved on a basis of equality and exchange that is grounded in respect for the participants’ knowledge and experience, diversity and truths. It calls for impatience with participants’ creating barriers and impermeable membranes, seeking unified theories, and exercising dominance.

Out of this movement, the most difficult I believe is the one towards refusing the privileging of our status as experts, the one transgression that is of our own professional, disciplinary and social value. The removal of the haughty veneer, the knowing smirk, the condescending attitude of listening without really hearing because we’re busy thinking of what were about to say next or already deconstructing the argument, however ill-formed, being presented to us. It is the personal transgression that we must allow to happen to ourselves that is the hardest, but it is also imperative to any solution to the problem of sustainability. We must be ready to give-up, surrender, to be the one to whom transgression happens...

Comments

[Vikas Menghwani]

Dear Sir,

You have mentioned extremely Important points. The humankind seems to be directionless today. Intellectuals see the need for incorporating various concerns (ethics, values, philosophies etc) in whichever way it is found just doable - still the direction is unknown. It is clear to me that the transformation of society, can happen most efficiently through education. But how!! I also underwent an Ethics course during graduation, and the whole time I kept looking for the rational behind it, it was of course not taken well by the students. The multitude of social issues are to be considered together! and they are to be done in the most efficient way.

Vikas Menghwani
India
Graduate in Engineering