Class notes, S D15

Daniel Kahneman, at TEDtalks: experiencing v. remembering self

The question of the self as a teacher - 'what is my pedagogical nature?' (van Manen).  What are my biases and cognitive errors?  How do I filter out parts of my experience and allow others in? What contexts do I occupy?  What are my intentions (my goals and pursuits)? What are my intensions (the things I attend to and of which I am aware)?

The experiencing self lives 'in' the moment.  The remembering self tells stories about the moments it has lived. The experiencing self is lost, voiceless, ignored by the self constructed through memory.  And, as our earlier study of the fallibility of memory explains, how reliable is that self?

We remember experiences through the changes that take place, significant moments of the experience and the way experiences end. We have difficulty accepting the complexity of life - how willing are we to inquire into our manifold 'meaning questions'?  We have difficulty not focusing on those significant moments (the focusing illusion), taking them as representative of the larger whole. As Bracey reminds us to ask, do they?

Data, information, experienced comes through a continuum between completely raw to completely processed.  If consciousness is itself a filter, then our perceptions are always already processed; critical thought - problematizing experience - demonstrates that ongoing processing never ends.

The teaching cycle and the reflection cycle are, thus, the same.  We teach ('unwittingly' per Schon); we reflect (multiple sources; multiple perspectives; position-taking, empathy, examining validity claims); we plan (the best of what we know now); we teach; we reflect; we plan ...