Egosystem: A Visualization of Wholeness Amidst Environmental Uncertainty and Fragmentation

Abstract

Students are embedded in a stochastic world. Postmodern practitioners of fragmentation accept this, however they dispute Jungian and Eriksonian wholeness. The existential representation ego as a two-dimensional thing, the Kantian-, Jungian- I-formation is questioned. Similarly, Gardnerian frames of mind and MI are questioned as functional pedagogical models within the context of a stochastic reality. Thus, the term literacy must be expanded to address this enduring reality of both the classroom, and the shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic, urban landscapes through which students move daily. Egosystem (Author, 2005) is a perfect model for this environmental kaleidoscope. This requires a new literacy, a true 'reading the world' (Freire, 1995). We understand that the classical ego is an extension of a system of influential forces of the embedding world that inform, shape and re-shape it. Egosystem is the new complex ego struggling for survival. Uncertainty is the undercurrent beneath volatile educational environments wherein visual arts achieves some measure of control by offering challenging design problems. Archaic and modern confrontation with challenges presented by this stochastic world is an impetus for intellectual development through increasing visualization, heightened awareness, self-healing and self-renewal. The search for wholeness extends the Jungian archetype of teleiosis to an enlightened version of the whole Self within an entropic field that tends towards fragmentation. It is the same ego-consciousness and environmental awareness the genus Homo used to negotiate survival within the original stochastic classroom of the African Rift Valley. We witness the same successive growth of modern students learning to solve challenging design problems, to adapt and to change within an uncertain world. As ego evolves into egosystem ― with its palpable links to a stochastic environmental milieu ― so students evolve through a consequential series of 'successive emancipations of the human will and intellect' (Malraux, 1956).