Education is a highly complex process beginning with our first breath on earth. From that day forward, education becomes a life long journey with a thirst to learn about the wonders of our universe and the human condition. The symbiotic relationship between teacher<>student – teaching<>learning is fundamentally at the core of how humans discover and pursue humanness.
The learning process is life-long. We never stop learning. Learning provides opportunities to discover what was thought to be impossible, creates awareness, introduces new skills, provides experiences and sentiments never felt before leading to emotional intelligence, moral courage, introspection, personal growth and change.
Life-long-learning plays a significant role in all aspects of Diversity Literacy. Education and its processes allow opportunities to develop metacognitive awareness of ourselves and others. But education alone does not guarantee civic responsibility nor the pursuit of the truth. That responsibility rests squarely on our shoulders on a daily basis as a life long journey.
Family, schooling and society are instrumental in establishing a social curriculum that shapes beliefs, attitudes and predispositions. That curriculum can lead negatively to self-oppression by denying and refuting life-long-learning or it can create lenses and processes by which to view and experience the liberating forces of knowledge.
The option to live as a life-long-learner by choice and design can enhance the quality of life, provide views of the world and its inhabitants that are not static, exclusive, and narrow but dynamic, inclusive and multi-dimensional. Learning is always there, from first to last breath as an option to life-long-growth… life-long-change.
January 27 is the day the United Nations General Assembly designated to be the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, I join many families that will pause to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism….
This past year, All Saints Literacy Center piloted a supplemental program called “Whole Person Literacy” focused on spiritual and cultural literacy based on concepts of knowing, understanding, and self-development. We had monthly activities that were carried out in pairs or in groups. Learners and tutors participating in the program gained knowledge and created meaning individually and socially as they took part in the activities. The needs of the whole person were explored through an alternative lens of literacy.
“If we embrace the promise of diversity, of creative conflict, and of “losing” in order to “win,” we still face one final fear – the fear that a live encounter with otherness will challenge or even compel us to change our lives.
Otherness taken seriously, always invites transformation, calling us not only to new facts and theories and values but also to new ways of living our lives – and that is, the most daunting threat of all.” Parker J. Palmer