A significant amount of sense-making takes place in the college years, and formation happens regardless of how we educate. Springboard works with the premise that we can be intentional about creating conditions under which formation occurs. We call for a re-imagination of what higher education can be and what it is for. We call for a commitment to engaging the whole learner—body, mind and spirit—in a lived practice that can orient a young person toward a life of meaning and purpose and a commitment to the well-being of the planet and the good life for all. We work with the premise that formation happens in relationship–to self, community, and place–and that small-scale, material environments foster these relationships. Through practices of attention, frank dialogue and care for self and others, and communal-civic responsibility and decision making, microcolleges and living-learning institutes work with PWL traditions that have long been treated as central to philosophical formation.

Springboard works with a three-pronged strategy to develop more humanly-scaled, community-oriented learning communities for young adults. First, Springboard supports the development of a robust field of models we can point to as examples of what formative education (grounded in what PWL articulates as spiritual exercises) might look like. These are exemplary “practice grounds” that can also function as lures and reference-points for a wider PWL ecosystem. Second, Springboard works to develop and coalesce a research and evidence base to understand how transformative learning happens in the young adult years and make the case for why it is important. Finally, Springboard works to develop an ecosystem of educators, funders, students, and college and university affiliates that supports the flourishing of existing transformative learning communities and the deliberate development of new communities.

In this session, Springboard’s Executive Director Kam Bellamy will share why Springboard works to ensure young people are invited into learning communities in which experiences of connection to self, community, and place are intentionally cultivated, as conditions for humane formation and philosophical living. We will hear from the PWL oriented philosopher and Seguinland Institute’s Executive Director Phillip Francis about his work to create a deeply transformative learning community, and how work with Springboard catalyzed Seguinland Institute’s development. We will hear the status of the research work and how it is working to bolster the ecosystem of funders and educators committed to this work. Finally, we will hear a call for support for greater collaboration with college and university partners to ensure more young people are afforded opportunities to be part of deeply transformative learning communities. We will invite ISPWL members into dialogue about their own work building enclaves for philosophical and transformational learning, and how we can work together to, institutionally and culturally, make such “practice grounds” a durable part of the higher education landscape rather than isolated exceptions.

Suggested Reading

Springboard’s 2024 White Paper:

Distinctive Pedagogies that Address the Meaning Crisis in Higher Education: Case Studies from Microcolleges and Living-Learning Institutes

To learn more about the seminar, and our collaboration with the International Society for Philosophy as a Way of Life see here.

Attendance is free but restricted to the members of the ISPWL. If you wish to become a member, please fill in this form.

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This talk is based on my forthcoming book, Reading Philosophy and Practicing Leadership: Applied Hermeneutics in an Age of Instrumental Individualism. “Instrumental individualism” refers to the modern primacy of the individual, recently unmoored from moral frameworks, who uses reason and discourse as tools and weapons to serve individual aims rather than to advance historical and social understanding. A broadly defined version of “philosophical hermeneutics,” exemplified by thinkers including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanual Levinas, and Charles Taylor, provides a counter to modern individualism, emphasizing dialogue, authentic questioning, historical understanding, acceptance of otherness, avoidance of certainty in favor of open-ended experience, the metaphoric development of concepts, and placing the self at risk in the context of historically determined horizons.

The second part of the talk will address the intersection between this hermeneutic approach and Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWL). Hermeneutics and PWL both overlap and diverge on issues of history, language, and the role of the philosopher, which makes “living hermeneutically” both an example of and a divergence from PWL. Drawing on Gadamer’s critique of abstract philosophy in favor of lived understanding, Ricoeur’s theory of action as text, and PWL founder Pierre Hadot’s work on the historic separation of discourse and life in philosophy, I will discuss the benefits and challenges of incorporating hermeneutics into the lived experiences of leadership. The interpretive act of writing about these issues is examined as both the production of a discourse about leadership and a lived hermeneutic engagement.

Bio

Dr. David P. Haney is the former president of Hiram College and Centenary University and has served in faculty and administrative roles at several public and private colleges and universities. He has published on higher education issues in outlets including Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he is the author of two monographs on Penn State Press’s Literature and Philosophy series: William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation (1993) and The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy (2001). His new book, forthcoming on Springer Press, is Reading Philosophy and Practicing Leadership: Applied Hermeneutics in an Age of Instrumental Individualism. He holds an MA and PhD in English from the University at Buffalo and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. For more information, see davidphaney.com.

To learn more about the seminar, and our collaboration with the International Society for Philosophy as a Way of Life see here.

Attendance is free but restricted to the members of the ISPWL. If you wish to become a member, please fill in this form.