Worlds Within, Part One: Awareness, Creativity, and Learning

Abstract

Drawing upon several strands of disparate but established thought-the science education, the Lexical Approach, mind-body medicine, and psychology-allows the synthesis of a compelling alternative view of the way we learn foreign languages, the way we construct our world as we negotiate the on-going construction of self, and ultimately of the ways we teach. Such a view entails the recognition of self and world as interdependent and the perception of language as discourse, not grammar; as lexis, not vocabulary. The teacher's the imparting of knowledge to working with the students as they work with themselves using the language. The role of the learner changes from passive reception and imitation to active engagement with the self while working with the language. Such a view is based on the learning processes that children have mastered before they entered school. Children engage their innate creativity (the ability of the mind to produce a ceaseless flow of thoughts, images, feelings, moods, and resultant physiological states) as they pro-actively explore the new world into which they have been born and change their behavior using the feedback they receive from their environment. By doing so, children not only negotiate the construction of their self-identities but also begin the process of embodying the spontaneous creativity that comes with the fluent use of their first foreign language (i.e., their native language). The pro-active exploration of the world begun in childhood and lost through subsequent school education can be recovered through mindfulness training.