Coalescing and Potentializing Integrative Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter furthers integrative higher education theory by connecting three meta-approaches—Bhaskar’s critical realism, Morin’s complex thought, and Wilber’s integral theory—and advancing a metatheory matrix. Following identification of the complex global crisis context, the first half of the chapter provides an overview of the three approaches—including complementarities arising from possible lacunae in each—as well as reviewing the major interests of their educational discourses; it then explores their joint contribution to education through the transversal lenses of philosophy of knowledge, andragogy/heutagogy, and normativity. The second half of the chapter potentializes the type of contribution such approaches can make to higher education theory and philosophy by advancing a yet deeper transversal engagement, one inspired by a complex interpretation of Boyer’s ‘scholarship of integration’; the engagement involves a matrix of: identity, relationality, and contextuality—in relation to: content of education, processes of education and systems of education. Calling upon such thinkers as Aurobindo, Buber, Gebser, Schumacher, Tarnas, and Davis, topics include: accountability, culture wars, currere, developmental levels, dialectics, ecological crisis, eco-logics, ethics, homo economicus, modern atomism, multiple intelligences, pertinence, planetary consciousness, poetics, postformal thinking, reconstructive postmodernism, schooling, systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, and worldviews.