i am experiencing a wide range of emotions all at the same time while walking through the process of dialogue. i am happy, inspired, frustrated, angry, interested, tired, hopeless, optimistic, realistic, pessimistic, contemplative, pensive, thoughtful, creative, open-minded, narrow-minded, expressive etc. etc... this course truly is a roller-coaster - up and down, and to the sides. and in directions and dimensions i never thought existed.
university education offers only one possible lens we can look at the world's problems. i feel like i am being taken out of a carefully crafted box called "academia" and i am actually asked to look at the world as it is and as it should be. but it's so difficult to be aware of, let alone control our biases which shape our perception. one of the biggest ironies here is that academia has become so narrow-minded in its vision of the world and detached from the real world that all too often it solves problems that don't really exist or that are not so important all together.
through experiencing feedback on the pitch of my group's presentation, i discovered that people tend to problem-solve before problem-frame... shouldn't the order really be reversed? i mean, did i really understand the scope of the issue? do i know what and why am i undertaking? many "experts" deal with serious stuff, like the recent oil spill in the carribean, are not able to explain in simple language what are they actually doing and why. they don't really know the problem they're dealing with. in this example, the problem wouldn't be the spill - that's only the tip of the iceberg. the actual problem is dependency of our everyday lives on oil. and that may not even be deep enough, but you know what i am getting at here - the solution is not to fix the leaking pipe. wrong definition (or lack definition of the problem) leads to badly targeted and/or futile problem solving.
but when it comes to people (let's call them "experts") who do these jobs, they'd become all defensive of their ideas and what they're doing! and i felt that too when receiving totally valid feedback from the group and instructors during the pitch of our group presentation projects. that day i felt really frustrated, so i went to talk to one of the instructors. he said that this course is meant to destroy us in a way. in a good way. that's what we're paying for. but then, he assured, we will get rebuilt again with a fresh outlook on everything: the world, the people and possibilities to make the two work in symbiosis.
what a random stream of thoughts!! ^^
