Start with this "lecture" and then get right into reading
Women's Ways of Knowing.
Worldviews and How They Shift
Ideas have their own histories and trajectories. The ideas inWomen's Ways of Knowing had their beginnings in the work of Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist. At loose ends, the young Piaget signed on to work with Alfred Binet, who was devising a test for the French Ministry of Education to figure out which children would benefit from an education. (Thus was born the modern intelligence test!) Piaget was hired to test young children, and he noticed right away that the right-wrong format of the test did not even begin to tap the complexity of children's thinking. This insight led him to devise his own way of interviewing children, using stories, props, or whatever would get the children thinking and telling him their thoughts.
Piaget believed that intelligence is the biological gift that all humans are born with. He was not interested in comparing one child to another and ranking their intelligence. Rather, he sought to understand the workings of intelligence in all of us. Humans are meaning-makers, he reasoned; we seek to make sense of the world. As we develop from infants to children to adolescents to adults, our understanding grows also. Piaget's research demonstrated that "intelligence" grows in systematic ways. We all go through similar stages, which I am calling worldviews.
Let me explain "worldview" by example.
- Consider the saying: give a child a hammer and all the world's a nail. That's a kind of worldview: the child's reality is importantly influenced by the tool s/he has and what s/he can do with it.
- A four-month-old baby can put hand to mouth, can suck and can grasp objects such as rattles, necklaces, etc. Those are some of her new tools, and she uses them to explore her world. To a large extent, her definition of physical reality (outside of interactions with people) is shaped by these grasp-suck tools.
Young children have many more skills than grasp-and-suck, but still they are limited. They think the moon is following them. They don't realize that other people have different feelings and priorities and even see things from a different angle than they do. One personal example: my young nephew, Chris, loved his new hammer and assumed that his baby brother -- who couldn't have cared less -- coveted it. So he "hid" the hammer behind a chair leg, in full view of everyone but himself!
Piaget called this stage "preoperational thought." A classic example of preoperational thought in young children is showing the child two identical glasses of water. Then, the adult pours one glass into a taller, thinner glass, resulting in the water level in the new glass being much higher. When the child is asked, "Do we still have the same amount of water to drink, or does one of us have more?" s/he replies that the adult has more, because the water is higher.
One can fool a young child for awhile this way -- giving him/her "more" juice in a tall skinny glass. But sooner or later the child's worldview will change: S/he will realize that taller is also skinnier; that you didn't add or take away any water. There has been a shift in worldview.
Even though we adults have moved far beyond preoperational thought, our minds still operate on the same principles as a child's mind. We take in the world and make sense of it according to our current understanding -- whatever mental tools or structures we've built over the years. Sometimes we have to stretch, because we encounter events or objects or people or relationships that don't quite fit. Often, the stretch is small. But sometimes, we need to stretch so much that we find that our whole worldview is altered. We now see things or understand the world in a whole new way.
Here's an example of a shift in worldview that I experienced:
I was raised in a family that was loving but quite strict. Whatever the adults said, went. Absolute obedience was expected and talking back was not allowed (dramatically punished by having one's mouth washed out with soap). When I was about 8 or 9, while paging through our brand-new encyclopedias, I came upon the color plate of a painting depicting a naked woman. I was shocked! In my family, nakedness was bad, and almost anything to do with bodies was an occasion for shame and secrecy. As I looked at that picture, though, I started to think:
- this is a book of knowledge and they are showing a naked lady and saying it is art
- art is about beauty; this artist must think this body is beautiful
- maybe bodies aren't only bad and shameful
- maybe my parents aren't right about everything.
From then on, I looked at my parents with a newly critical eye (although I still didn't talk back). I began painstakingly to try to think things through for myself rather than accept what other people said was good and bad.
Discussion 1: Grab a pen and paper and set your timer for 5 minutes. Don't worry about punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc. For the next 5 minutes, write whatever comes into your head in response to this "starter":
I experienced a shift in worldview when….
When the 5 minutes is up, read over what you wrote. Edit it however you'd like for eventual posting to the Worldview discussion under Discussion, wk 2 at left. Before you post, though, read over what you wrote and add your thoughts about the following questions:
- What led to or supported this shift in worldview?
- How was the world different for you after the shift?
Post all of the above to the Worldview discussion.