Mission and Vision
"Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement."—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Integral Urban Education: The Tree of Heaven Project is a call to recognize, investigate, and meet the need for meaning, purpose, authenticity, connectedness, and wholeness in urban education. An integral project questions traditional approaches that regard knowledge as fragmented bits disconnected from everyday meaning, values, practices, and relationships. It calls for educators to move beyond polarities such as cognitive and affective, outcomes and experience, and knowledge for self or society. In doing so it challenges the current misguided neoliberal "reform" movement that attacks public education and tries to impose market values and practices in teaching and learning for the sake of global competition. An integral education is transformational. While it builds on progressive and contemplative pedagogies that value the interior life, personal meaning, and social connectedness it works through a more critical transcendent framework that accounts for developmental, cultural, behavioral, social, and spiritual qualities. Our mission is to study, share, and practice ways in education that contribute to the evolution of human consciousness in our quest for goodness (morals), truth (science), and beauty (art) in all aspects of life. We distinguish an integral perspective from postmodern relativism (there is no truth) and from a fixed, absolute agenda (there is only one truth). We seek to become conscious of the emergent processes in which we participate and to enact the most comprehensive awareness from the highest developmental altitude possible.
We are inspired by the ailanthus altissimus, the common, hardy tree that grows in Brooklyn and other urban areas, taken from Betty Smith's coming-of-age novel of a girl who through adversity evolves in spiritual ways to become a writer. That tree emerges through the concrete toward heaven: We seek to touch both.
Integral as a Philosophy, an Approach, and a Way of Life
We take an integral approach in order to evolve and arrive at a place of greatest possible goodness, wisdom and love: Ultimately this is the experience and enactment of universal nonduality or enlightenment that occurs here in the world. We are moved by an evolutionary imperative; we seek to transform ourselves for the sake of all living beings and shed our attachment to our small selves. At the end of such a quest we awaken; we realize that all this time, all along, (even right now), there is and has been in the deepest sense no separation between ourselves and all others, our societal institutions, all living things, and the world and the universe itself — our sense of separateness has been a kind of mirage — and that our awakened state of "I amness" is one of unity with the entire cosmos.
We may know it in some ways, catch a glimpse at times — but we are not yet there.
In practice integral means to take as many perspectives as we can: I (subjective), we (intersubjective) and it/s (objective and interobjective). Not content with just one narrow focus, we insist on broadening the lens to take in and call out the (often) implicit cultural, structural and natural contexts. We examine our own perspectives as well from more transcendent or evolved viewpoints. This is a moral perspective that values the well-being of all living beings and engages with the world to bring this about. The aim is to free ourselves and all others from the box of our own opinions and judgments to which we become attached. To do so we look at ourselves and others through a developmental model — egocentric, conventional, post-conventional and integral, since stages of self development structure and filter how we perceive and interpret our experience. In examining the cultural contexts that give rise to evolving consciousness we consider traditional, modern, and postmodern frameworks from an integral perspective. A hierarchy of development is one of growth, not power. Each level includes and transcends previous ones. "If every perspective is like a lens or filter that distorts perception and inference, then we can correct for these distortions to the extent that we understand something about the lens or filter itself (turning subject into objects, as [Robert] Kegan frames it.)." — Tom Murray, "From Progressive Pedagogy to Integral Pedagogy"
We examine our self development and commit to healthy growth for all. With individuals, ourselves included, we consider personal histories, disorders, traumas, blind spots and addictive patterns that get in the way of personal growth and fulfilling relationships. Within organizational frameworks such as schools we also look at the quality and degree of leadership, flexibility, respect, caring, community and balance between individual and collective needs, among other things. We then work to help people, organizations, and communities heal and become healthier at the developmental level they are at. This is translational work. When they are ready to move on we help them evolve to a later developmental stage that encompasses previous ones. This is transformational work and to which we are most committed.
Integral acknowledges and respects the historical stages of development of different cultures in terms of their worldviews and values--traditional, modernist, and postmodern; it is not about imposing values on others. It recognizes that these are essential aspects of cultural development and part of our own human history. In terms of its own perspective Integral takes the best of these stages of cultural worldviews. Thus it recognizes the profound wisdom of universal moral values within Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and other early traditions. But it rejects the superstitious, nonscientific and outmoded social relations (e.g. patriarchy, homophobia) that tend to accompany these historically earlier worldviews. Integral embraces the methods, findings, rationality and scientific evidence from the modernist epoch that arose later and challenged traditional thinking; it joins in the quest for objective truth through research in science, neuroscience, psychology, sociology and other social sciences. However, it refuses to insist that only rational and material evidence count as knowledge and wisdom and that material or empirical science is all there is. Taken to its extreme this makes for a flatland devoid of beauty, enchantment and mystery. And Integral draws upon the more recently evolved postmodern critique of modernism: the dismantling of grand narratives that serve as justification for dominant political agents and ideologies; the flowering of multiperspectival approaches that allow for more inclusive viewpoints; and the awareness of culturally, socially constructed meanings and the infinite networks of interlocking relationships and contexts that give rise to meaning itself. However, it rejects the relativism and limited surface perspective of postmodernism, the claim that there are no truths (itself an assertion of truth and thereby a contradiction), and the notion that science and subjectivity (the self) exist only as cultural constructions.
Transformational Contemplative Practice
We draw in part upon transformational contemplative traditions developed from earlier times, such as those within Buddhism, to act in and on the world in order to reach enlightenment and relieve suffering or unhappiness for all beings. From this perspective unhappiness stems from a fundamental sense of lack, a feeling that one is never enough. If the Buddhists have it right the self at bottom is not a separate, unchanging entity independent of its relationships to all other beings, organizations, and things. The sense of suffering then stems from attempting to grasp and solidify a self that is not there, to make permanent and unchanging something that is not, to try to fill up something externally through consumerism, or through others, that cannot be fulfilled in such a way. A Buddhist position that leads away from suffering is to turn the impermanence on its head and embrace it:
"If reality itself is always incomplete, each moment becomes complete in itself, lacking nothing….The fruit of the Buddhist path is a freedom serene and empowered because [it is] not preoccupied with securing a self that cannot be secured." — David R. Loy, The World is Made of Stories
Mindfulness, or insight meditation, is an essential contemplative practice, the original intent of which is transformational: to overcome the ego and expand universal consciousness and identification with all beings. Yet recently mindfulness is increasingly used to prop up the self and reinforce the individualism that is predominant in our culture.
Of late engaged Buddhists are speaking out about how mindfulness is being employed in corporate, military, government and education settings. They argue that mindfulness is not about ego enhancement, stress reduction, or private bliss or happiness in the conventional sense; nor is it a neutral, amoral technology, such as focusing or paying attention, that can be applied to self-centered goals or to those of conventional institutions that practice exploitation, aggression, or deception. The use of mindfulness in those cases reinforces those aspects of society that are the sources of many people's unhappiness in the first place. We do not practice mindfulness to maintain or accommodate to the moral level of the status quo. Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Rather, we agree that the intention of mindfulness is to overcome the self, its grasping or greed, ill-will or harmfulness, and delusion or ignorance and deceit in all areas of life; these include transforming unhealthy social institutions and patterns of relationships that take on a life of their own in their own terms and are not just the sum of each individual's private consciousness. We see insight meditation not as stress-reducing but stress-inducing in the sense that it challenges us to let go of our attachments to the self and as an opportunity to evolve toward increasingly expansive horizons:
Bhikku Boddhi calls "the attitude we need 'conscientious compassion.' This is not sentimental compassion, a lofty but aloof disposition of the heart. Rather, it is a fierce compassion spurred by the pangs of conscience and a deep identification with the pain of the world. This compassion urges us to struggle, even against immense odds, to defend and uphold the inalienable dignity of every human being against those who see people as objects of manipulation and exploitation. It ushers us on to the path of action, of sacred action rooted in the moral imperative of creating a world that will work for everyone, including the planet itself."
David Loy poses a paradox and suggests a way to transcend it: "Personally and socially we need both sides of [socially engaged spirituality]: The world is perfect just as it is now, and yet it also calls desperately for radical action. That paradox can’t be resolved in an intellectual or rational way, but it can be resolved in our practice, in how we actually live our lives. We need to realize something wholly healing about the here and now at the same time as we’re trying to develop in a fruitful direction." (2005)
Transformational Buddhist activists and scholars are thereby engaged in interpreting, expanding, and adapting the tradition within western culture in the twenty first century in ways that challenge rather than adapt to institutions that maintain the socially unjust status quo. These activities and aims also can be supplemented and possibly strengthened in explicit ways through an integral framework. An integral perspective builds on the wisdom of early traditions and brings in developmental awareness within psychological, cultural and structural contexts gained through modern and postmodern thinking, investigations and practices.
Integral Urban as Community
"Urban" as a cultural signifier often holds a negative and disparaging meaning: the grittiness and lack of safety of the inner-city; poor public schools; poverty; a code word for African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants and the youth of those communities. More recently its meaning has come to include the struggle for innovative cultural institutions and opportunities and between gentrified and multicultural neighborhoods; and neighbors of disparate class and background that sometimes don't and sometimes do get along and help each other.
Here "urban" is meant to invoke the fundamental spirit of cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and inclusion, the potential for everyone, of all diverse backgrounds and political stripes, to get along — to live, work, help and love one another in a democratic, public endeavor that is a beautiful, shining work-in-progress, one that bonds all people together. No one is left out; all are welcome, honored and celebrated as unique individuals and members of unique groups — all are loved — all the time. It is the actual practice of making our everyday lives both richly unique and universal, that is, spiritual, through our compassion and connectedness with each other. Within urban schools and school communities we aim to create a "we-space" on higher ground in which we listen to each other with an open mind and heart, are open to look at ourselves and our attachments, and through dialogue create new meanings together in emerging relationships. This is a challenging endeavor, all the more so in that we are living in "two cities" between the well-off and those with limited resources, among other everyday divisions. Yet we see this as inseparable from all forms of education. This visionary urban spirit, the new City of Friends, that at a deep level infuses Brooklyn, infuses New York, and perhaps all North American and world cities, is invoked by the Brooklyn bard, Walt Whitman:
I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the
attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust
love — it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words
Integral Education: Include and Transcend
"Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy." — William Blake
A battle rages over education. Can wisdom be sold in the market? Those who determine educational policy think so and see education as a commodity that increases their chances for economic success in the competitive global market. Neoliberal "reformers," few of whom are educators, want to re-make public education in the image of market values and practices. The standardized common core, high-stakes testing, privatizing education through charter schools, and the demonizing of public sector teachers and their unions are part of the current climate under which educators must work. Outcomes trump knowledge; teacher scripts replace dialogue. Arts programs are cut and community schools are shut. Schools of education are now required to ship their students' videotaped performances to Pearson Publishing Corporation who will profit from the power to evaluate student teachers about whom they have neither knowledge nor with whom they have any relationship.
Critics show that the crisis of education is a myth. Test scores overall are high, dropout rates are low. They challenge the attack on public education. They argue that the top-down reforms have little to do with real education, diminish teachers' professional competencies and experience, fill the pockets of private corporations, and engender stress among students as well as parents and teachers. Educator Diane Ravitch emphasizes the need for the public good and says the real issue is poverty and that testing is a false solution and reduces the quality of education. She warns: "Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities."
Others too point out that our society's priorities are misguided and harmful. Chris Hedges says that: "A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death." (Empire of Illusion). Elsewhere he says: "Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked...They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience." Henry Giroux (2011) explains how our political system has turned people into zombies — "people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead — they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs."
Progressive education traditions in contrast take a holistic approach that values the whole child and the importance of relationships. Contemplative education as one progressive tradition insists on a pedagogy that cultivates the interior that includes meaning and values. Parker Palmer, in The Heart of Higher Education, argues that "Higher education looses upon the world too many people who are masters of external, objective reality, with the knowledge and skill to manipulate it, but who understand little or nothing about inner drivers of their own behavior...We need to stop releasing our students into the wild without systematically challenging them to take an inner as well as outer journey." His colleague, Arthur Zajonc, sees contemplative inquiry as a method that complements other analytic approaches in higher education. Furthermore, he says, "I see contemplative inquiry as the expression of an epistemology of love that is the true heart of higher education."
To what extent are progressive practices such as contemplative education able to respond to the neoliberal onslaught? Is a contemplative pedagogy that emphasizes the interior, from a first person perspective, an adequate alternative?
Integral Includes and Transcends Contemplative Education
The field of integral education, as pioneers Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Jonathan Reams and Olen Gunnlaugson (2010) point out, "is still nascent, working to clarify its own boundaries and struggling to gain broader acceptance and legitimacy" (p. 4). As an emerging field it "has no simple definitions, clear prescriptions or 10 easy steps to follow" (p. 13). However, they point out "important distinctions and points of departure" that characterize integral educational approaches from various educational theories and practices known as alternative, holistic, and transformative approaches (p. 2). Contemplative and mindful approaches to education are included in these.
Because it takes the broadest possible perspective an integral framework is value-added with respect to progressive educations. It includes and transcends contemplative principles and adds value over and above these (Murray, 2009). An integral approach does so by taking the orientations and practices of progressive and contemplative educations and turns them into objects of awareness; that is, unlike those educations themselves, it makes explicit the critical positions of their constructs, relations, and subjective meanings and the ways they are structured in consciousness. "One of the characteristics of this [integral] consciousness is its ability to integrate multiple systems, seeing the essence of them and weaving connections where at previous stages none may be perceived to exist" (Reams, 2011, p 11). Integral adds other perspectives, in particular developmental, evolutionary, systemic, and relational ones. Murray (2009, p. 10) notes: "At the integral level one is not only learning and using a set of pedagogies, but adopting a critical (and "appreciative") meta-perspective on those pedagogies. One is also noticing how one's self (including one's values and assumptions) fits into the system of teacher-applying-pedagogy-within-an-educational-system."
The meta-perspective on one's self is most apparent in the area of adult development and it is here that a significant distinction arises between alternative, progressive, holistic and contemplative education and an integral approach. For Robert Kegan (1994), the process of development includes turning one's patterns or structures of thinking, which are experienced from within, into objects of one's own awareness from a more inclusive perspective (ego-aware consciousness). Kegan calls for educators to assist students who tend to take conventional perspectives (e.g. doing things by the book), or stage three, to develop to the next level (e.g. thinking on one’s feet), stage four. This later stage is characterized by greater autonomy, flexibility, openness, tolerance for ambiguity, self-reflection, creativity and complexity.
Integral urban education engages in the practice of turning one’s own thinking into an object of awareness and contextualizing our socially constructed characteristics — and takes it a step further. An integral approach considers the significance of various perspectives on urban education not just from socially constructed categories but from the most expansive possible perspectives, which include and arise from later developing levels of consciousness, for example, construct-awareness and ego-awareness. Construct-awareness, as Cook Greuter (2005, p. 28) describes it, is to become cognizant of the pitfalls of language, as well as of concepts and rational thought itself, with its "profound splits and paradoxes" in which "good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness may now appear as two sides of the same coin." Ego-awareness occurs when "the ego becomes transparent to itself. Final knowledge about the self or anything else is seen as illusive and unattainable through effort and reason because all conscious thought, all cognition is recognized as constructed and, therefore, split off from the underlying, cohesive, non-dual truth" (Cook-Greuter, 2005, p. 28). Thus integral urban education moves from Kegan’s stage four, which primarily characterizes progressive education, to stage five and allows one to reflect on whole belief systems, including one's own, and to see them arise within varying contexts. Tom Murray makes this distinction:
"The progressive, alternative, reform, and holistic pedagogies…are associated with [Kegan’s] fourth order (and reach into his fifth order.) Integral approaches are more centrally fifth order. Applied to the domain of education, learners at Kegan’s fourth order are self-directed (or self-authoring, co-creative) learners who can examine themselves and their culture, develop critical thinking and individual initiative, and take responsibility for their learning and productivity. At full fourth-order consciousness, individuals have mastered skills such as these, and in the process of doing so, likely became advocates of such skills and identified with them believing this level of skill superior to others. Typically, they have practiced and identified with one or a small number of progressive schools of thought…
At Kegan's fifth-order individuals begin to reflect upon whole belief systems, even their own fourth-order beliefs, as limited and indeterminate systems. They begin to dis-identify with any particular belief system, and experience themselves as embodying a variety of evolving belief systems, surfacing in different contexts.
Questions of "who am I," what do I believe," "what is true," and "what is right" cease to have one best optimal answer ("it depends!") Rather than responding to situations by looking for optimal or win-win solutions (a fourth-order approach,) fifth-order individuals see themselves as co-evolving constituents of each situation, and expect a problem situation or dilemma to transform them; they may continue to search for an adequate solution or approach to a problem — each developmental level transcends and includes prior ones, as Wilber notes (Murray, 2010, p. 26)."
Contemplative education then, while contributing significantly to integral education, requires that it too be reflected on from a fifth-order or integral perspective in terms of construct, ego and relational awareness which by itself it cannot provide. Contemplative pedagogy is primarily a first person or monological endeavor. It has turned to another monological practice, neuroscience, in an effort to gain more credibility; however these perspectives are not adequate to respond to the onslaught of postmodernism's insight that experience is never purely "given" but always occurs as constructed within particular cultural, social, and historical contexts (that is, dialogical or second person perspectives). Integral education supplements contemplative perspectives by adding models of self development (examining contemplative education itself from later order stages), other psychological aspects, political and other systems contexts (interobjective), and crucial cultural and dialogical (second person or intersubjective) contexts that contemplative pedagogy does not explicitly address or examine. In this way integral serves as an "anti-virus protection" against hidden, implicit, infectuous, psychological patterns and cultural worldviews that are problematic or unhealthy and that lurk in the silent background of contemplative practices, such as conformist thinking, individualism, narcissism, consumerism and many other "isms" such as racism, sexism, and homophobia.
In Integral Urban Education we reflect on all our enactments from as many perspectives as possible; we hold them lightly in order to transform ourselves and our world as we reach out with love and discernment toward the good, true, and beautiful. An integral framework for urban education then enables us to consciously participate in and contribute to the evolution of human development, to evolve toward more encompassing, universal ways of being. This requires conscious enactment in all realms, personal, moral, developmental, cultural, social, and political.
"Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone." — Ken Wilber
"Real contemplation gives rise to just actions; theory and praxis are in an indissoluble connection." — Dorothy Soelle,The Silent Cry: Mysticism as Resistance
Our mission is to a) welcome and find a place for all approaches to education that share our basic values, whether or not they are explicitly integral, while encouraging them to supplement and expand their perspective; and b) strive to develop and practice explicitly integral forms of urban education that are useful to as many people as possible.
Toward this end the Project is currently addressing two issues within education:
The first is to challenge the neoliberal ideology and policy campaign that corporatizes education and works against the values we endorse of promoting optimal development of all and to develop integral educational practices. Rather than regarding education as a creative, expansive activity that honors individual student abilities and qualities and respects the professional work of teachers, this campaign attacks public sector teachers and schools and installs high stakes testing and common core standards in the service of employing schooling to further individualistic and corporate competition in the global market. The disturbing emotional fallout experienced by students, parents, and teachers from neoliberal policies requires a higher moral-based response and the crafting of a meaningful, transformational framework and practice of education in collaboration with those most involved.
The second is to challenge the technocratic use of mindfulness practices in education that occurs within the context of neoliberal policies. A growing number of educators introduce mindfulness practices for the purposes of enhancing stress reduction for teachers and to teach anger management, social emotional learning, and improve attention and executive function for students. Such practices are not explicitly grounded in a moral worldview and do not acknowledge the actual political, cultural, moral, developmental, and social context in which they operate. Absent an explicit understanding and analysis, any of the goals above can be used for any purpose. As a consequence, while often introduced into schools with good intentions, mindfulness inadvertently reinforces conventional values that maintain neoliberal relations of power, social control and the status quo. Instead we seek to consciously situate and develop mindfulness practices within a broader integral curriculum that reinstates a more evolved moral and social justice purpose of contemplative activities from early traditions and towards this end employs an awareness of the developmental, cultural, social, and political contexts in which mindfulness is taught. This can strengthen and define the meaning of contemplative practices in schools if they become a part of an integral developmental project.
In the first case there is a lack of acknowledging the interior, the richness of creativity, imagination, meaning, and consciousness in the name of a socially unjust movement that benefits the few. In the second case there is a lack of acknowledging the exterior conditions, the complexity of existing social relations and societal structures that comprise and contextualize the meaning of everyday life and that give rise to morally problematic forms of life. Internal and external concerns are inseparable; in order to help the world morally evolve we need both.
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