Teaching and Learning for Wholeness by Mayes Clifford;

Author:Mayes, Clifford;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated

Chapter 5

In the Light of the Shadow Curriculum

In the first part of this chapter, let us first further look into some of the territory we have covered by going more deeply into archetypal shadow dynamics in teaching and learning, for they often constellate upon the ongoing call to adventure throughout the lifecycle of the class. Although the shadow may appear in any classroom at any time, it is especially prominent when the student is being encouraged to examine sensitive commitments that he has brought to the class.

The second part of this chapter is a closer look at Jung’s studies in alchemy as symbolic of the individuating psyche. This provides us with unique and uniquely powerful pedagogical symbols and terms.

Third follows a discussion of what I will call the “shadow curriculum.” This involves Jung’s idea of “the inferior function.”

Finally, we consider the Jungian notion of a collective cultural conscious and its archetypal shadow, applying these ideas to current multicultural educational theory and practice.

We will see how much light can be gathered from the archetype of the shadow in the classroom.

Part One

More on the Hero’s Journey and Its Educational Implications

“Education for individuation,” another term for education in the spirit of the symbol, revolves around the holistic well-being of the student, including her cognitive growth, of course, but with a special emphasis on her psychospiritual development (Mayes, 2005a, 2007, 2009a). Education for individuation aims at something akin to what the great 20th-century Curriculum Theorist Duane Huebner characterized in theological language as “education for ultimacy” under the beckoning “lure of the transcendent” (1999).

In both education for individuation and education for “Ultimacy” (Tillich, 1956), the student is invited to appropriate and employ what happens in the classroom in order to enrich her ever more vibrant and creative subjectivity. The focus is thus on the student’s existential project of forging satisfying and evolving life narratives as they move toward individuation against the backdrop of the eternal (Ricoeur, 1976).

A challenge in education for individuation, however, is that the student may register the call for profound transformation, in not only cognitive but also deep psychospiritual areas of his being, as a threat to who and what he is—a perceived danger to his existence as it is presently constituted by myriad influences and commitments. This may give rise to a wide range of emotions in the student. In some students, those emotions may be resistive and even aggressive.

This can cause the student’s shadow to constellate, which he then projects onto the teacher in a classic case of negative transference. Such negative transferences are called “dystonic” in psychoanalytic parlance.

The archetype of the puer or puella may constellate dystonically as the student’s way of hunkering down in an act of rejecting the teacher’s call for him or her to relinquish a simplistic opinion. This is typically one cherished by his or her family and/or culture of origin. As we have seen throughout this book, a sound general rule in both educational theory and practice is that it is important to recognize

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