On the Pedagogy of Suffering
Hermeneutic and Buddhist Meditations
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- “Just This Once”: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Suffering
- Chapter One: “You’re Very Clever Young Man”
- Prelude I: An Invocation from St. Jerome
- Prelude II: Two Invocations from Tsong-Kha-Pa
- What Truth Lies in the Phenomenological Ancestry of Contemporary Hermeneutics?
- A Brief Pseudo-Psychological/Biographical Speculation
- “Coming to Grief”
- End Part
- Chapter Two: Idiot Compassion
- Compassion’s Contemporary Face: Compassion without Horizons
- Interlude
- An Easy Mistake
- Afterword: Compassion Walking
- Chapter Three: From the “Science of Disease” to the “Understanding of Those Who Suffer”: The Cultivation of an Interpretive Understanding of “Behaviour Problems” in Children
- A Central and Illustrative Anecdote: Sam Overflows the Frame around him
- Interwoven, Historical Logics
- Aristotle’s Logic of A=A
- Descartes’ Isolated Knowing
- Auguste Comte’s Science, Logical Positivism, and Behaviourism
- At Play in Emotional-Behavioural Disabilities Today
- Simplified and Contradicting, Sometimes Paralyzing, Binaries
- Moving, Accelerating, and Fragmenting Targets
- “Just Plain Sick”
- Shrinking “This,” Expanding “That”
- Rights as Choice and Defense
- Coding’s In-Efficiency Movement
- The Norm: Misleading Logic and Exclusion
- Counterproductivity and Emancipation
- Shared Esteem or “Ourselves as Others”
- Chapter Four: A Pocket of Darkness
- Chapter Five: First Fragment: Breaking the Gaze
- I
- II
- Chapter Six: Suffering Loves and Needs Company: Buddhist and Daoist Perspectives on the Counselor as Companion
- Meeting the Person: The I, The Thou, and the I-Thou
- Sitting in the Midst of Fire with Another: A Buddhist Perspective
- Daoist Perspective and Resources
- Journey’s End
- Chapter Seven: Codes
- Codes
- Chapter Eight: Second Fragment: Thoughts on “Breaking the Gaze”
- Chapter Nine: My Treasured Relation
- Chapter Ten: Some Introductory Words for Two Little Earth-Cousins
- Chapter Eleven: This Is Why We Read. This Is Why We Write
- Chapter Twelve: The Elision of Suffering in Mental Health Nursing
- Suffering as Epiphenomenon
- Suffering: Occasions and Elisions
- Suffering: A Buddhist Thought Experiment
- Note
- Chapter Thirteen: Fragment Three: Bringing Suffering into the Path
- Chapter Fourteen: A Black Blessing
- Chapter Fifteen: Time
- Chapter Sixteen: Quickening, Patience, Suffering
- A Fortuitous E-Mail Exchange
- To Begin, Singing
- An Elongated Political and Ecological Chorus
- A Side-Note on an Iatrogenic Loop
- “Just Start Doing It”
- Second Last Mull
- A Song at the End of Things with Too Many Things to Say All at once
- Chapter Seventeen: Smart Ass Cripple
- The Problem with “Suffers from”
- Suffering from Finitude
- Suffering from and Fighting Ableism
- Outrage, Tragic Laughter, and Suffering from Disability
- Suffering and the Aesthetic(s) of Disability
- The Passion(s) of Mike Ervin Aka Smart Ass Cripple
- Smart Ass Cripple
- Retelling “Suffers from”
- Chapter Eighteen: The Comfort of Suffering
- Chapter Nineteen: Fragment Four: “And Yet, and Yet”
- Chapter Twenty: “Neither They nor Their Reward”
- Chapter Twenty-One: “Nobody Understood Why I Should Be Grieving”
- I
- II
- III
- Chapter Twenty-Two: “God’s Sufferings Teach God Nothing”: Some Emails
- Chapter Twenty-Three: Compassion Loves Suffering: Notes on a Paper Never Written
- Chapter Twenty-Four: “Isn’t All Oncology Hermeneutic?”
- Concluding Reflections
- Chapter Twenty-Five: “They Are All with Me”: Troubled Youth in Troubled Schools
- The Space In-Between
- Hidden Treasure in the Trouble Itself
- Suffering’s Complexity
- “The Measure of All Things”
- Mindfulness in Education
- “I Just Knew I Had to Do It”
- “I Cannot Do So”
- Letting Go, Listening for the In-Between
- Chapter Twenty-Six: Happiness in Bricks
- The Mind
- Mindfulness
- The Body
- Mindfulness in Extreme Pain
- Living with Pain
- Chapter Twenty-Seven: Suffering “Like This”: Interpretation and the Pedagogical Disruption of the Dual System of Education
- Suffering and School Failure
- Counter-Productivity
- A Pedagogy of Suffering
- “Like this”
- Normalization
- Interpretation as Non-Attachment
- Chapter Twenty-Eight: Morning Thoughts on Application
- Chapter Twenty-Nine: In Praise of Radiant Beings
- A Preambling Couplet
- “Even There”
- Ah! Wabi Sabi
- “Protodoxa (Urdoxa)”
- “Break Open the Being of the Object”
- “Every Word Breaks Forth”
- “It Draws You into its Path”
- “Present in the Thing”
- Post-Ambulatory Couplet
- Contributor Bios
- References
- Index
- Series Index
“Just This Once”:
An Introduction TO THE Pedagogy OF Suffering
The Descent into the Womb Sutra states:
Even though you have been born a human with such limitless suffering, you still have the best of situations. It is difficult to attain this even in ten million eons. Even when a deity dies, the other deities say, “May you have a happy rebirth.” By happy rebirth they mean a human rebirth.
Why would I waste this…good life? When I act as though it were insignificant, I am deceiving myself. What could be more foolish than this? Just this once I am free
....
Although we have sunk into the midst of cyclic existence
An ocean of suffering with neither bottom nor shore
We are not disenchanted; we are pleased and excited.
We boast of happiness. This seems insane.
(Tsong-kha-pa, 2000, pp. 121, 333)
We ought to be like elephants in the noontime sun in summer, when they are tormented by heat and thirst and catch sight of a cool lake. They throw themselves into the water with the greatest pleasure and without a moment’s hesitation. In just the same way, for the sake of ourselves and others, we should give ourselves joyfully to the practice. (Kunzang Pelden, 2007, p. 255) ← 1 | 2 →
Our cover illustration by Katy Orme was done in a wonderful kindergarten classroom. Each year without fail, the teacher selects a particular artist or period of an artist’s work, or has a local artist visit the classroom, and this becomes the locale of intense observation, appreciation, and emulation. The children imitate, practice, and talk with each other about the place they have found themselves in. In this particular case, we find ourselves in Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period. If you are going to venture yourself to this time and place and palette, let alone in the company of very young children, you need to be, well, good. Discussions were had about Picasso’s loss of a dear friend, about sadness, about colors and their emotional effects, about how the distortion or elongation of the face helps betray difficult things where words fail and images rise up. The children were gently pushed up against the limitations of the colors available to them and were encouraged to talk about how this hemmed them in and kept them focused and seemed to open up possibilities while at once constricting them. All in all, tough wonderful work. It is a mild and lovely instance of coming to learn through letting oneself undergo the trials and tribulations of a venture beyond oneself and the locales of one’s comfort, and to return from that venture changed. It is an instance of the difficult work of pedagogical judgment, where the suicide of Picasso’s friend was held in abeyance—too much, it was decided, would overwhelm the venture altogether. That turning thus towards a measure of suffering and endurance and transformation can afford, paradoxically, a great pleasure, is the sweet spot of our considerations of the pedagogy of suffering.
Many of our colleagues have been quite adamant: “This seems insane.” But then, as teachers (and, we are finding, beyond this to many of those in other professions, and to many in their most intimate lives), we recognize something of the urge to test oneself against the world, to cultivate and practice this tough measure again and again, even though one could just as easily not do so. “Why don’t they just stop?” (Jardine, Clifford, & Friesen, 2008, p. 213). Because somehow, despite its lack of necessity and crass, “real-world” utility, the gift of practice, of study, of deliberately suffering the consequences of coming to understand, lures and allures because, in its very lack of necessity, attending to suffering portends a lessening of suffering and an upwelling of generosity, love, compassion, and joy that emerges both because of and in spite of suffering itself:
It is always and necessarily unnecessary. It is excessive (Schrift, 1997, p. 7). It is an abundance (Hyde, 1983, p. 22) that does not diminish but increases in the giving away. It is a form of love because, “as in love, our satisfaction sets us at ease because we know that somehow its use at once assures its plenty” (p. 22). (Jardine, Clifford, & Friesen 2008, p. 211) ← 2 | 3 →
This text aims to understand and articulate how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. This is an ancient idea from the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus (c. 525 BCE)—pathei mathos, or, “learning through suffering.” In our understandable rush to ameliorate suffering at every turn, and to consider every instance of it as an error to be avoided at all costs, we explore how the pedagogy that can come from suffering becomes obscured, and that something vital to a rich and vibrant pedagogy can become lost. This collection threads through education, nursing, psychiatry, ecology, medicine; through scholarship and intimate breaths; and blends together affinities between hermeneutic conceptions of the cultivation of character, and Buddhist meditations on suffering and its locale in our lives.
A key element in contemporary hermeneutic theory of experience is that there is something unavoidably difficult, and transformative, in the act of becoming experienced in the ways of the world. This experience extends across the whole gamut of human life, from small, exhilarating interruptions of one’s expectations (moments of inquiry, learning, engagement, investigation, questioning) to traumatic experiences of mortality, impermanence, and illness, to cultural and intercultural, personal and imaginal, histories of grief, conflict, and potential reconciliation. Hermeneutically understood, education is centered on a concept from the Humanist tradition: Bildung, a German term meaning “self-formation.” It is a process of becoming someone, a process that is undergone, endured, or “suffered” in the act of coming to know about oneself and the world.
Key elements of Buddhist thought and practice are insights into the suffering and impermanence of life, and the practices of mindfulness, compassion, and right conduct that might make such suffering endurable. Buddhism also provides articulations of how the panicky retreat from such realities only increases suffering and its hold. Buddhism’s understanding of suffering thus provides, in many of the chapters of our text, an elaboration of how suffering can be understood, endured, and utilized as a site for the cultivation of knowledge and wisdom.
We fully understand the fact that all of the professions represented in our text are fraught with both histories and contemporary instances of inflicting suffering, as Alice Miller (1989) horrifyingly put it, “for your own good.” We understand how our venture must be met with caution and concern. We know, too, how the amelioration of unnecessary suffering is precisely the work of these disciplines. That is why we will proceed hermeneutically in these explorations, that is, by paying close attention to cases, events, and episodes that open up the nature, limits, dangers, and potentialities of a pedagogy of suffering. We are interested, therefore, in the contingent and difficult practices that emerge in our professions around this phenomenon and the comportment of caution and hesitancy that is necessary to ← 3 | 4 → such practices precisely because of the risk inherent in the phenomenon of suffering. It is through paying close attention to those instances of suffering as a pedagogic experience that we can propose ways of finding the optimal balance between the opposite dangers for practitioners of being overwhelmed by suffering, or of denying it through mechanical routines.
We would like to acknowledge our contributors’ gifts and thank them for their work. We acknowledge, too, the following journals for their permission to reprint some of the chapters that follow:
CHAPTER 3: Gilham, C. M. (2012). From the “Science of Disease” to the “Understanding of Those Who Suffer”: The Cultivation of an Interpretive Understanding of “Behaviour Problems” in Children. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.synergiesprairies.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/33
CHAPTERS 4 and 15: Innes, J. (2014). A Pocket of Darkness, and Time. In Seidel, J., & Jardine, D. (2014). Ecological Pedagogy, Buddhist Pedagogy, Hermeneutic Pedagogy: Experiments in a Curriculum for Miracles (pp. 102, 109). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
CHAPTERS 5, 8, 13, and 19: Jardine, D., McCaffrey, G., & Gilham C. (2014). The pedagogy of suffering: Four fragments. Paideusis, 21(2), 4–12.
CHAPTER 6: Cohen, A., & Bai, H. (2008). Suffering Loves and Needs Company: Buddhist and Daoist Perspectives on the Counselor as Companion. Canadian Journal of Counselling/Revue Canadienne de Counseling, 42(1), 45–56.
CHAPTER 7: Williamson, J. (2012). Codes. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. Retrieved from http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/47/50
CHAPTER 9: Latremouille, J. (2014). My Treasured Relation. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/62
CHAPTER 10: Jardine, D. (2014). Some Introductory Words for Two Little Earth Cousins. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/61
CHAPTER 11: Jardine, D. (2014). This Is Why We Read. This Is Why We Write. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/64/pdf
CHAPTER 24: Moules, N. J., Jardine, D., McCaffrey, G., & Brown, C. (2013). Isn’t All of Oncology Hermeneutic? Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.synergiesprairies.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/43
CHAPTER 27: Gilham, C. (n.d.). Suffering “Like This”: The Pedagogical Disruption of Special Education. Paideusis. ← 4 | 5 →
CHAPTER 28: Jardine, D. (2013). Guest Editorial: Morning Thoughts on Application. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Retrieved from http://jah.synergiesprairies.ca/jah/index.php/jah/article/view/52
CHAPTER 29: Jardine, D. (2014). In Praise of Radiant Beings. In Seidel, J., & Jardine, D., Ecological Pedagogy, Buddhist Pedagogy, Hermeneutic Pedagogy: Experiments in a Curriculum for Miracles (pp. 153–169). New York, NY: Peter Lang. ← 5 | 6 →
← 6 | 7 →
CHAPTER ONE
“You’re Very Clever Young Man”
PRELUDE I: AN INVOCATION FROM ST. JEROME
“I said in my alarm, ‘Every man is a liar!’ ” (Psalm 116:11). The Hebrew text varies a little: “I said in my alarm ‘Every man is a lie!’ ” for the meaning of the word, ZECAM, is lie. I shall please the Lord in the land of the living; but I know that, as far as my body is concerned, I am nothing. There is no truth in our substance, there is only shadow and in a certain sense a lie. As I reflect on human life…I do not find truth in this world. “Lie” is used here in the sense of a shadow, as it were, a phantom. (Saint Jerome, 1964, pp. 293–294, emphasis added)
Details
- Pages
- VIII, 282
- Publication Year
- 2015
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781453914250
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781454196594
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781454196600
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433125249
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433125256
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-1-4539-1425-0
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (January)
- Keywords
- teaching learning psychiatry ecology medicine
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2015. 282 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
