NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURES – CONNECTED JOURNEYS
Karin Lundberg
Was in einem engeren Gesichtskreise, in unserer Nähe, dem forschenden Geist lan- ge unerklärlich blieb, wird oft durch Beobachtungen aufgehellt, die auf einer Wanderung in die entlegensten Regionen angestellt worden sind.(…) Eine allgemeine Verkettung, nicht in einfacher linearer Richtung, sondern in netzartig verschlungenem Gewebe.
Alexander von Humboldt1
It has not infrequently happened, that researches made at remote distances have often and unexpectedly thrown light upon subjects which had long resisted the attempts made to explain them, within the narrow limit of our own sphere of observation. (…) Organic forms that had long remained isolated, both in the animal and vegetable kingdom, have been connected by the discovery of intermediate links or stages of transition.
Alexander von Humboldt
This quotation by scientist, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who has come to form the constitutive link in my research, teaching and general professional growth over the past few years, exemplifies the thinking of his universal science concept that played a pioneering role in the conceptualization of “general education” in the early 19th century. In order to shed light on what is familiar in our immediate environment, to be able “to see” (Gesichtskreis) it more clearly, we must venture into the unknown, and open ourselves up to “distant regions” that will uncover and help us to decode what is strange and foreign. Therefore, it is through the reflection of ourselves in what seems foreign that we gain an understanding of who we are and where and how we fit in an interconnected world of phenomena.
This insight can be arrived at, not in a linear fashion, but in a web-like (netzartig) intricate fabric of the world.2
What do we as educators of the new millennium have in common with Humboldt’s worldview, which he shared in his public lectures and his writings close to two centuries ago? We, like him, are in the midst of an exciting and unpredictable rethinking of the world. We, like his fellow citizens in Europe of his time, are experiencing a new wave of globalization and exploration of global networks. We, just like his other colleagues in the generation following the Enlightenment, are excited about a new flood of knowledge and information exchange, which is reflected in the move from sources such as the 18th century “Encyclopedia” to our more fluent and accessible world of cyberspace. Finally, the vision of the “cosmopolite,” “der Weltbürger,” is alive in what we would like to see as a new “global citizenship” of our time. On the other hand, we also find ourselves at a new and baffling crossroads at which inherited forms of literacy and knowledge acquisition are seeing a turn-over to new, multimodal ways of communicating within a complex web of global networks, seemingly light years away from Humboldt’s ideas of the world. Indeed, we are sharing knowledge, cultures, goods and ideas at an unprecedented level, while at the same time battling a world of disorder, confusion and economic meltdowns wrapped up in a Gordian knot of the rational and irrational. The analogy to Humboldt, his vision and his world seems to end here. Or does it? Contemporary Humboldt scholar, Ottmar Ette, points to the difficulties in identifying our times, by revisiting Goya’s El Sueno de la Razon Produce Monstruos and its inherent ambivalence. 3
Is it the sleeping reason or its dreams that produce the monsters and the madness, that have sprung from Western civilization in the past 200 years? Ette emphasizes Goya’s own addition of “Ydioma Universal” to the title of the painting. (Ette, 2002). Here, it seems, lies the clue. The allegory of “reason” as a universal human contradiction speaks a universal language. It is in the imbalance of the mind, its separation from nature, the shortcomings of human communication, and in Humboldt’s words, the failure “to see,” to recognize oneself in the other, that breed the madness and the monsters that characterized periods of history like the Hitlerian era with their manifestations of evil. These questions remain: Where are we in our times of global communication and trading of information, ideas and knowledge? Are we finally able to overcome what keeps us from seeing the world as one? And what is our role as educators in this complex world-wide web? Humboldt seemed to answer these questions as he expounded on his philosophy of universal science.
1 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos.I. Bearbeitet fuer die Gegenwart von Hanno Beck, Stuttgart, Brockhaus. 1978.
2 Humboldt, Alexander von. Cosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the universe. Volume 1. London, 1849-1858. 5 vols.
3 Ette, Ottmar. Weltbewusstsein. Velbruck Wissenschaft, Göttingen, Germany 2002.
Is it possible that we, the inhabitants of a century that has seen the fiercest exploitation of the globe known to man so far, benefit from the works of an “over- educated,” privileged man, a child of the Enlightenment, a scientist and explorer? Humboldt’s Cosmos, both as a scientific concept and as a literary work, describes a network of knowledge by emphasizing the attempt to include, and not to exclude. As a scholar and citizen, Humboldt communicated between cultures and sought to bridge and acknowledge diverse worlds, both culturally and physically.
His concept was built on the interconnectedness within a pluralistic world seen as one. (Ette, 2002) The human being was not to be viewed in isolation, separated from the physical world of botany, zoology, or even geology. The arts, the aesthetics, and the human senses were to play a part in our descriptions, observations and explanation of world phenomena. He spoke of the physical world and the sciences as “ein Weltgemälde,” a “painting of the world,” an interwoven dialog between human (aesthetic) perception and observation skills and the physical, natural environment. Consequently, his thinking came to be shaped around a transdisciplinary, cosmopolitan or global approach to a world-wide web of knowledge and the sciences that in turn was to be disseminated in the broader public since, in his view, a healthy society rested on broad public knowledge and awareness of the world.4 Here, it is impossible not to detect the intriguing and inspiring link between Humboldt’s universal science concept and the recently outlined effort to define and implement general education skills within our very own learning community. It is in the content, as well as in the interwoven links between disciplines and the capacity to connect that true knowledge transpires and students can place themselves within the broader scope of historic time and place.
El Sueno de la Razon Produce Monstruos5
4 Ette, Ottmar. Humboldt’s Relevanz im Netzzeitalter. Humboldt Review 12, 2006
5 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: Plate 43 of The Caprices (Los Caprichos), 1799.
Source: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: Plate 43
of The Caprices (Los Caprichos) (18.64.43) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Humboldt’s willingness ”to see,” to discover oneself in the foreign, his ability to uncover the interconnectedness of cultures and natural phenomena and bring a seemingly disparate pluralistic world to a meaningful network is of immense interest to our own times of ill-defined globalization and an adequate concept for today’s intricate web of global exchange.6 However, what do Humboldt’s networks of knowledge and global citizenship have to do with a transnational, transcultural educator in the field of language acquisition in a small community college in the Bronx? As I revisit my own origins, I would like to return to the significance of the introductory quote of “seeing oneself in the foreign” to discover the familiar “im eigenen Gesichtskreis” here.
GENESIS OF AN ART
As a child in elementary school, in mono-cultural Sweden of the Sixties, it occasionally happened that a “foreigner” would join our class. Their appearance was different from the rest of the children: they wore different clothing and used body language and manners to which we were not accustomed. They were in other words “strangers,” separated from our code of behavior and therefore excluded from our world of communication. Their words were not ours and hence we remained apart. Such was the situation for these children who randomly appeared during the school year in a strange country they were too young to make out on a map. This was also how I was offered my first assignment of “assisting” the newcomers in class. Because they were strategically placed next to me, I helped them out with reading and writing and, over time, these newcomers were mysteriously transformed into speakers of Swedish.
I developed a fascination with these “strangers,” their looks and behaviors, the sound of their own words and the way they spent time in the school yard, watching and studying the new world of “the others.” They had turned into observers of the unknown and I, on the other hand, had become the mediator with a blurry idea of how to make “the other side” understand the new environment. We walked around the schoolyard exchanging words in our different languages. As a result, I can still count in Finnish, which I was taught while jumping rope in the 1st grade.
Later, as a college student, my plans led me to Heidelberg, Germany, where I enrolled at the University to study German language and literature. I was now under the same roof with students from all five continents: Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Latin- and North Americans, Europeans and more. We were bewildered, but curious, and formed friendships and relationships among each other that came to change my outlook on the world forever. By now my life had found its focus: I lived between cultures, I learned how to negotiate an understanding and to build bridges between customs, religions and ideologies. From that point on, I would absorb knowledge through a lens very different from the idea of the world I had brought with me from the North. Like Humboldt, I had “ventured on a journey to remote regions” and uncovered new dimensions of my “self.” How does this translate to the educator I became and the community college I teach at an urban crossroads in the Bronx?
COMMUNITY AND EDUCATION: COMMUNICATING NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE
Going back to the simple situation in the schoolyard, we can already grasp at the grass- roots level what teaching and learning in a community college with a large immigrant population entails. A community college represents education within a certain community. The “stranger” in the schoolyard was the observer of “the other.” By reading the environment, he or she tried to make sense of what he or she saw in the immediate environment. Linking this experience to education, we can identify the individual’s interaction as a veritable foundation of knowledge Similar to Humboldt’s vision, and the ability to see, observe and make connections, knowledge ultimately means reading and understanding one’s environment, to negotiate meaning in one’s interactions with the outside world, i.e. in what one absorbs as information or experience. Again, it is in the reflections of “foreign” that we gain an understanding of ourselves. At the bottom of knowledge, therefore, lies language, the written or the spoken word, images, signs, symbols or gestures. Language, therefore, is an indispensable tool in the negotiation of meaning, which ultimately generates knowledge and a mastering of the world around us, through which we make up the fabric of the “Weltgemälde.”
The immigrant student community can be identified in a very similar way.
The students live in a community, which is partly their own and partly belongs to “the other.” They are constantly faced with the task of interpreting a different set of codes and behaviors, of negotiating meaning in an environment and in a language, they do not yet own. At the same time, a large immigrant student body forms a culture in itself, with shared values and social behaviors. This is the inseparable dichotomy in which immigrant college students exist and where we as educators step in. I would like to compare it to what we identify as the “halfmoon.” We perceive the moon as “half” because we see only the illuminated part, while the other half remains invisible, albeit still in existence. In many ways, this illustrates the co- existence between students and faculty members. We each only see one side of each other’s worlds; and we constantly need to shed light on the other half in order to form an understanding of the whole. Therefore, being in between, our greatest challenge as scholars and instructors is to find the tools required to negotiate between these two entities which ultimately renew and enrich a community that generates new forms of culture that others will name over time.
6 Ette transforms the Humboldtian science to what he would like to call a new global “ Weltwissenschaft” (“world science”). Ette, 2006, p.4
Consequently, as a faculty member in the field of English language acquisition, my foremost goal is to offer students the tools of communication in an academic environment that strives towards what at this point, I believe, is best defined as a network of “global literacy.” As I described before, these tools empower the students to negotiate meaning as a form of knowledge. The three main pillars in my teaching are therefore the following: communication (language), learner -centered knowledge acquisition (content), and finally academic skills-building (methods and strategies). Consequently, the acquisition of academic language skills has to be closely linked to purpose and context, which creates the very challenge for the instructor, who constantly navigates the students within this triad of language, content and purpose. The end result is a communication of facts, opinions and critical reflections, which are expressed in essays, journals, summaries, research projects, and oral presentations. In the four years I have been at Hostos, I have been fortunate to constantly grow in this area, to apply my teaching philosophy in fruitful and creative ways which embrace the transcultural and interdisciplinary scope of knowledge and communication that can form the foundation for global citizenship that Humboldt described through his vision of world-wide networks.