Collected Works of Heesoon Bai

This chapter is composed of a series of writing fragments that functions as personal meditations on various themes in Wittgenstein’s work as they find resonance in this author’s professional and personal life: as educational philosopher, educator, and psychotherapist. These themes focus on human suffering induced by being captured in reification of discursive thoughts and propositional knowledge claims, including knowledge claims based on seeing ourselves as predominantly causality bound . In commenting on numerous passages from Wittgenstein’s works, possibilities of human liberation are sought through seeing ourselves anew as beings capable of exercising human freedom and responsibility . Along the way, nuanced and critical clarifications are made about the distinction between desire and craving, and between fulfillment and satisfaction; instrumental reason serving causality-bound thinking; learning that cultivates sensibility and judgment; Wittgensteinian’s pedagogy that resists objectification of students; critical importance of ethics and aesthetics to human liberation and flourishing; and interconnectedness, or unity, of philosophy, therapy, and education when seen through Wittgensteinian’s lens.

This paper identifies assumptions about education behind the mainstream North American schooling: that the primary educational goal is to teach subject matter and deliver knowledge and skills, most often divorced from the immediacy of students’ lifeworld, in the service of consumerism driven industrial civilization. Moreover, student behavior defined as unproductive and disruptive in terms of reaching such instrumentalist goal is seen as in need of control and management, which then becomes central concern and operation of schooling. This paper challenges these assumptions and offers a larger educational vision and practice in alignment with world wisdom traditions, namely becoming more fully human. We describe becoming human in terms of becoming increasingly whole, integrated, attuned, and in alignment in the three-fold relationality of self-other-nature. We then propose contemplative education as a way to cultivate becoming human, and offer an example of martial art practice and an alternative paradigm of classroom-as-dojo as a guiding metaphor. Contemplative learning in the dojo aims at embodied, intersubjective, and self-authoring practices.

Many teacher candidates get their first taste of life as a full-time teacher in their
practicums, during which they confront a host of challenges, pedagogical and ethical.
Because ethics is fundamental to the connection between teachers and students, teachercandidates
are often required to negotiate dilemmas in ways that keep with the ethical
ideals espoused both by the professional body and the community at large. Presenting
the case of a teacher-candidate who finds herself emotionally depleted in her devotion to
students, we look to the ethics of care and virtue, two luminary paradigms, for clarifying
insights. Care ethics extols inter-subjectivity and reciprocity, while virtue ethics enjoins
commitment to a noble ideal for its own sake; both perspectives offer useful insights for
our case. We argue that the perspectives and practices of contemplative traditions can
facilitate the integration of care and virtue ethics, mitigating the risk of disruption in
caring relations while minimizing the possibility of a personal preoccupation with virtue.
Drawing on the Bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism, we posit a “practice of selfwith-
other” as a way to enlarge a teacher’s relational capacity, thus apprehending
reciprocity and virtue as an interpenetrating mutuality. We conclude with reflections on
how contemplative perspectives might inform the teaching of ethics in teacher education
programs.

In a period of moral crisis and dark ecological issues, sport is often called to boost individual moral development. That is how outdoor activities are viewed as good educational practices to enhance environmental responsibility. However, these activities are following the same technological development as the whole society. As a consequence, in line with Jonas’ thinking (1984), do outdoor activities really enhance environmental responsibility? This paper will base its writing on a qualitative inquiry using interviews of outdoor activities practitioners (mountain guides and white water sports instructors). The results show that environmental responsibility development depends on the sport contexts. It is fostered in slow and none-technological activities (like trekking) and lowered in fast and technological activities (like canyoning, kayaking …). The discussion of our paper underlines the following paradox: technology enforces the birth of environmental responsibility (Jonas, 1984) and may prevent its development at the same time… as shown by our preliminary results.