(Download) "Co-Creating My Worldview (Report)" by Cross Currents * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Co-Creating My Worldview (Report)
- Author : Cross Currents
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 64 KB
Description
I felt a coldness--a sense that I was intruding on my family and in the world--long before I could name it or voice it. And when I finally conquered the feeling, it was my body that could say I was accepted, in the right place--home. Can I build a whole worldview on my sense of displacement? I have to start somewhere, and the first "where" is my own body and my own experience. I used to tell students in my introduction to philosophy courses that they could not generalize from their own experience that X is Y to the belief that all X is Y, but they could refute any such universal statement if it were not true to their experiences; for example, any statement that begins "All people are ... " that was not true about themselves cannot be true. They were people, they counted, and their experience was prime data. Only within that context did we realize that "All people are ... " formerly meant all men, and my women students felt written out of the tradition and even written out of the criteria defining what it means to be human. Feminism arose from a visceral place; feminist critiques are valid in that they expand what the tradition has to include. I build out from my starting point. That means, among other things, even if I felt there was no place for me within the time and concern of my parents, I could step back, look further, and see the larger context in which I did feel wanted and even needed. I was reaching for help to really experience this larger context. I began my quest--most recently--with asking whether I was one self or many. A prior question, of course, is Who am I? This much I knew: I can see myself only in the context of other people, of part to whole. Who teaches us who we are and how we are valued? How do we learn that we are pretty or cute or deficient? The standards are not out there, floating around in the ether. We know our worth by how people react to us. A friend in school suffered from retina damage of the kind that could, today, be corrected by laser surgery. But reading at that time, she saw some words, then a space, then more words followed by another space. She never thought of herself as having a disability. A classmate of ours, in contrast, got reading glasses and his parents "explained" to him that his nearsightedness constituted a flaw, an imperfection, a disability. Our expectations help determine how we judge things to be whole or impaired, good or bad, normal or deficient. Our first experience of the world is very small: we discover--learn, actually--who we are from our restricted contact with parents and other caregivers. Fortunately, we also have siblings and friends who early on give us an enlarged perspective.
 "Co-Creating My Worldview (Report)" by Cross Currents * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}