20 November 2024
Mellem Education: Between the spiritual and political
The spiritual seems to have no place in the political, as the way it looks now. But what does it mean to be spiritual? It’s not necessarily to believe in a greater force, or even to have long hours of meditation. For me, spirituality is simply the process of self-awareness, of being aware of yourself. This includes becoming aware of the parts of you that have been there all along, as well as the parts of you that have been conditioned through culture and upbringing. The process of self-awareness also includes releasing parts of yourself that no longer serve the version of you that you’ve grown into. Releasing old patterns and protective habits. I have always been immensely interested in self awareness, but I became especially engaged in this work after some disruptive events that launched me into a process of self-reflection, as they often do. Interestingly enough, it was a political education program (Betzavta), that combined these worlds for me. This is because Betzavta deals with the relationship between the individual and the group and turns the reflection into an examination of your role in a group process. Read more.
29 October 2024
Who Do You Align With? When solidarity becomes divisive
Joining a movement, especially one that aims to defend human rights and make the world more fair and balanced, is a defining action in our times. Defining or confining? This is the question I have been exploring as I watch movements strengthen, especially movements that seem to oppose one another. Having two separate movements, pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, means that these two movements somehow oppose each other. Their very existence defines and solidifies the other. The many Jews or Israelis that join pro-Palestine movements are immediately coded as anti-Israel. And the opposite is true as well. Is it not possible to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel? Is it not possible to be pro freedom and safety for all? If you go and ask people of these two movements if they are for freedom and safety for all, most people will say yes. The problem is, each side believes that the other said will say no, that only one side deserves this freedom and security. Read more.
22 October 2024
Intuitive Knowing: calling back our own power
I have recently been reflecting on the belief that learning has to be counter-intuitive. I go back to my assessment committee’s statement of not being able to learn anything new from my work. In a previous blog post, I questioned this premise based on the lens through which the learning was taking place. How can we learn anything new when we have fixed ideas of what learning looks like? In the academic world but also more generally in what we perceive as learning, there is a popular idea that learning has to be counter-intuitive, that it has to shake up a belief in favor of a different belief. What we thought was X is actually Y. The learning that I examine in my own work is intuitive learning, which is in fact a type of learning that reveals what you always already knew but was hidden. The belief shake up takes place but does not get replaced by a different belief. What we thought was X is questioned, and that unlearning process dusts off an inherent intuition. Read more.
18 October 2024
Agreement is not the only way to connect
Agreement is an immensely tempting way to connect. When someone agrees or shares our mindset, especially in the face of a different perspective, it is very a satisfying feeling. To hear someone express our own perspective confirms something in our identity. We claim, ‘yes, you are so right’, but the more gratifying sensation is that I am right, and you confirmed it. It gives a sense of belonging, that sense we have craved since childhood, that we are not alone, we have a community of people who share our belief systems. In our current times, however, this agreement has become so tempting that it has led to increasing polarization. It appears to be one of the main ways that we find connection and build community. Rather than community being a group of people with whom you share a variety of life experiences, these communities have become grounded in their agreement. It becomes increasingly difficult to express disagreement in these circles. Read more.
25 September 2024
PhD, EBD (Everything But Defense): On Paving Your Own Path
There are times that we are called to pave our own paths by being rejected from the mainstream paths. This is what happened with my PhD. I wrote a PhD about how dissonance can be a disruptive force that either encourages dissonance reduction strategies (staying on the path of habits and routines), or paves a new path of reflexivity, breaking out of existing assumptions and breaking open to embrace others’ perspectives. In the work, I showed and analyzed the learning process for those students who were able to take the alternative path. I showed how, through a facilitation of dissonance and a focus on process, students could be held and guided to embrace the dissonance and allow it to disrupt their own understandings of themselves. I shared their words and reflections, including their insecurities and confessions, the way they landed in uncomfortable truths, or just shared the discomfort of not feeling like they landed in any truth. The stories were very different, but each corresponded to the way they were able to undo a particular dissonance reduction strategy in themselves.
The assessment committee repeatedly rejected my research (three times), and with each rejection, I had my own dissonance reduction strategy to observe. Ultimately, the overarching pattern to undo was the fight towards having a committee validate this work. Read more.
7 June 2024
I was invited to speak on a panel about Zionism. Those who know me and my work may find it strange that I would speak on such a panel, but the organizers wanted to include diverse perspectives. It takes somewhat of a risk to do this, and I appreciate their openness.
In my talk, I shared that I would not speak about Zionism, as content, but speak about the ways in which we engage in the debate about Zionism, which I claim is just as important to the learning process. I introduced the concept of dissonance, the clash between old and new perspectives, and our natural inclination to reduce dissonance so that we can stay in the comfort of our own worldview.
I shared the value of lingering in dissonance through a personal example of my own dissonance. Around ten years ago, when I first moved to Denmark, I found myself in a very unstable and dissonant state. Because I was in this state, I was able to open up and ask questions about stable knowledge that I grew up with. Read more.