Jennifer Gidley

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Intellectual Bio

Jennifer Gidley:

1.

"You are interested in why, how and when I became interested in my current research project, which I call "integration of integral views".

My first involvement with integral philosophies was around thirty years ago when I first encountered Rudolf Steiner's writings. The 1970swere exciting times intellectually and culturally as there was an influx of new ideas and cultural movement. As a young psychologist-educator I was influenced by humanist and transpersonal psychology and particularly by critical pedagogy theories, e.g., Paolo Freire(1970) and Ivan Illich (1975). I was also drawn to various postmodern and feminist philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Foucault and de Beauvoir. There was a powerful shift of consciousness beginning to break into the formal academic world from the periphery at this time. My professional work in educational psychology already focused on the marginal voices. I worked with teachers of young people who did not "fit into "mainstream education, and ran a women's community learning centre empowering "house-bound" women to re-enter employment or tertiary education. I was also beginning to study traditional Eastern spiritual philosophies as a balance to my background. So when I came to Steiner education, in the 1980s, I was already enacting critical theory, though with limited conceptual framework for it. As a professional, I was aware of serious limitations of the factory-like model of mainstream education and, as a mother, did not consider it suitable for my children. I decided to found a Steiner school, but sought to transcend the conservative, cobweb-covered, 19th century version of Steiner education (Gidley, 2008a). The school I founded and pioneered for ten years was a contemporary, creative adaptation of Steiner's work (Steiner, 1894/1964, 1901/1973,1904/1993, 1909/1965, 1932/1966, 1967, 1971, 1981, 1982, 1990) to late 20th century, sub-tropical rural Australia. I was aware intuitively and experientially of what a powerful and positive educational approach this was but was frustrated to realise that it was completely marginalised by the mainstream academy. In the 1990s I decided to re-enter the academy, with the aim of both testing my intuitions and finding appropriate language to create dialogue between Steiner's integrative pedagogy and the academy. My Masters research indicated that Steiner-educated students, while holding similar fears and concerns about the future to other students, had a stronger sense of empowerment and capacity to envisage positive preferred futures (Gidley, 1998). Over the next ten years I continued to broaden and deepen my reading, researching and writing about educational and youth futures (Gidley& Hampson, 2008; Gidley & Inayatullah, 2002; Inayatullah & Gidley, 2000), post-colonial alternatives to the factory model of schooling (Gidley, 2001a), the impact of globalisation on young people (Gidley, 2001b, 2004), and the evolution of culture and consciousness (Gidley, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). My doctoral research, which I have just completed, is a culmination and maturing of three decades of research and practice in integral forms of education. This is a rather long answer to your question, Markus, but around 2000, I rediscovered Wilber's writing (1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001) and found that it really resonated with my internalised Steiner philosophy. The more I read of Wilber the more I was amazed about the similarity between Wilber's ideas and what Steiner was writing a century earlier. I was stunned that in spite of Wilber's claims to be creating an "integral theory of everything" he had pretty much ignored one of the most integral figures of the 20th century —Rudolf Steiner. I decided that I would start a doctoral research project on the relationships between their works. But as I began to follow-up on some of the sources that Wilber referred to, such as Gebser (1949/1985, 1956/1996,1970/2005, 1972, 1996a, 1996b) and Sri Aurobindo (1909, 1914/2000, 1997), I became drawn into their original writings as well. As I began to search the literature for others who may have brought these pioneers together academically, I realised that apart from Roland Benedikter's research on Steiner and Wilber (Benedikter, 2005) (most of which is in German) no one else seems to have undertaken any major research project that integrate Steiner's, Gebser's and Wilber's integral contributions. Although I do bring Sri Aurobindo's writing in to some degree, I have not studied his work as intensively as the others, so I am a little more cautious with claims about his work."

(https://www.academia.edu/197838/A_transversal_dialogue_on_integral_education_and_planetary_consciousness_Markus_Molz_speaks_with_Jennifer_Gidley?)


2.

"As my contribution to further the development of integral theory, I have developed a layered framing through which to view the complementary nature of several significant integral theorists(Gidley, 2010a). For the purposes of this schematic summary I have chosen to focus on five integral theorists: Gebser, László, Sri Aurobindo, Steiner and Wilber; and two transdisciplinary theorists: Morin and Nicolescu. I propose to view the contributions from several metaphoric perspectives, introducing five—mostly new—terms to integral theory: macro-integral, meso-integral, micro-integral, participatory-integral, and transversal-integral. Based on this new framing I intend to demonstrate how the various integral approaches need not be seen to be in competition with each other but rather as complementary aspects of a broader articulation of noospheric breadth that is seeking living expression. Without implying that any of these terms represent closed, fixed categories or that any of the integral approaches could be contained completely within any of these concepts, I have theorized the following provisional mosaic of integral studies as it stands today (Gidley, 2007b, pp. 125-130).

...


In summary, my boundary-crossing contribution to the integral studies field includes:

- An integration of integral theories that deepens integral evolutionary theory by honoringthe significant yet undervalued theoretic components of participation/enactment and aesthetics/artistry via Steiner and Gebser as a complement to Wilber’s conceptual emphasis.

- A meta-framing of interrelationships among significant integrative approaches that are: inclusive of the vastness of noospheric breadth (macro-integral); that provide rigorous theoretic means for cohering it (meso-integral); that attend to the concrete details required for applying the theories (micro-integral); that encourage the participation of all aspects of the human being throughout this process participatory-integral); and that are able to traverse and converse across these multiple dimensions ( transversal-integral).

The significance implications of my contributions are that if proponents of the different streams of integral theory are able to see that they are not necessarily “in competition with each other” but rather are providing complementary perspectives that each support the other, then this can only benefit the growth of global knowledge futures in its broadest sense"

(https://www.academia.edu/8838334/Global_Knowledge_Futures_Articulating_the_Emergence_of_a_New_Meta_level_Field)