PostNormal Times: Speaking in Codes

PostNormal Times is a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world—a world where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. Andrew Vosko, PhD, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at CGU, and his guests explore ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. Get ready to challenge your assumptions.

In season 2, episode 5 of PostNormal Times, Andrew Vosko and guest Shamini Dias, director of curriculum and special projects and clinical assistant professor of transdisciplinary studies at CGU, discuss the intersections of language, discipline, and metacognition in transdisciplinary studies.

They explore the complexities of code-switching and the power of metaphorical thinking in shaping institutional perceptions and systems change, emphasizing the importance of fostering empathy and understanding through transdisciplinary literacies and transforming education into a collaborative community of practice. They encourage embracing ambiguity and uncertainty to tackle complex problems and show the need for a more empowering perspective on institutions and their potential for positive change.

Season 2 Episode 5 Transcript

ANDREW: Welcome to PostNormal Times, a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world, where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. In this series, I sit down with some of my favorite minds to explore new ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. I’m Andrew Vosko, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.

I’d like to welcome everybody back to PostNormal Times, where we don’t discuss business as usual, we discuss business, and by business, I mean anything including the kitchen sink or under the sun. I’m Andrew Vosko, and I’m here today with my collaborator at large, Professor Shamini Dias from the transdisciplinary studies program at CGU. Welcome, Shamini.

SHAMINI: Thank you, Andy. It’s great to be back.

ANDREW: It is great to be talking to you. And last time, we were talking about some really cool concepts as we opened up the podcast. We were talking about transdisciplinarity, kind of writ large, how it works at CGU, and how we got there. It was very biographical. I think that we never stopped talking about those things. But the world has, as the show describes, been changing rapidly and dramatically since we recorded our original conversation. So, one of the things that I’ve had many conversations with you about … is the relationship we both have with language. They’re different relationships, but they both center on this idea of language. Today, I was hoping we could talk about transdisciplinary language in our changing world. Would you be game for that?

SHAMINI: I would be, and I like the notion of languages when it comes to transdisciplinarity.

ANDREW: There’s a lot of them, right? So, when we started out, I learned that you also—in addition to having professional roots as a teaching artist, a consultant, and somebody who was involved with K–12 education and who is a PhD scholar in education itself—come from a world of literature and linguistics.

SHAMINI: That’s right.

ANDREW: And I actually had a background before I went into the sciences of language and literature itself—a little different, but a “cousin” of what you’d studied.

SHAMINI: I knew there was something.

ANDREW: And we’ve had these conversations from the get-go about the power of language to mold us. There are things that we study—and we’ve talked about this before, this idea that whatever you study linearly relates to what you do for a living—and my belief is that, well, yes and no. I kind of think of it as like cooking. Putting in a little tarragon doesn’t mean that you have a dish that necessarily screams tarragon. It adds to the milieu of flavors. You could put tarragon in a mushroom sauce, or you could put tarragon on the meat, and they both have different …

SHAMINI: The effect is different.

ANDREW: The effect is different even though both are tarragon. It doesn’t mean you have to do one versus the other. I think having a language and literature background doesn’t mean that you have to be a linguist or a literary scholar. Having them at different points in your life means that you bring these aspects that you didn’t even predict until they happened.

SHAMINI: … When you said tarragon, I was thinking of linguistics on the one hand, which is a social science like literature and the humanities. My experience is it’s a bit like Indian cooking. It’s a blend of spices. Every blend is different. The same household will blend the same spices slightly differently at a different time for a different dish. Those two areas of study, as it were, might have their own homes, but I think the way they’ve blended in us is both similar—there’s some things where we’re really like, “Oh, yeah, I know that”—and different. With Japanese in your history, in your background, the way you see the world might be a little different than my background in Malaysia and looking at the linguistics and semiotics of that space. This is why I think language is interesting because it is not separate from being grounded in your space and in the ground in which you grew or experienced life.

ANDREW: And transdisciplinarity is, for better or worse, a discipline. In transdisciplinary studies, one of the things that you learn is that we speak our own disciplinary languages. We have a linguistics to our discipline, we have a rhetoric to our disciplines, and we have styles of speech and writing and publication and evidence. It gets epistemological at some point. It teaches us to be very aware of those differences in languages that we have as we’re all trying to get at the same thing. Because one of those great truths about languages—usually, if we’re not studying them actively—is that we aren’t self-aware of our own languages.

SHAMINI: No, not at all.

ANDREW: It takes us completely out of that reflective space until we’re forced to be intentional about it and wonder what we’re doing. And the great irony is that being reflective about our own language requires us to use our own language to be reflective. It’s pathological, right?

SHAMINI: Yes.

ANDREW: We’re trapped by the same limitations of the definitions that our words have for creating the reality that we’re trying to describe. My martial arts instructor once said, “Words are clumsy.” Sometimes things aren’t best described by words.

SHAMINI: That’s why the artist is important.

ANDREW: And so many other things.

SHAMINI: They take us out of the realm of words to something that connects.

ANDREW: One of the examples that I got—and as you mentioned, I studied Japanese—was in studying a language that … if you ask me right now to speak it well, I’d probably not perform very well. It would probably be kind of embarrassing! But one of the things I remember early on was learning the different characters—which are based on a Chinese system—of the Japanese alphabet. One of the characters that really affected me was this character that describes harmony, and harmony is wa in Japanese. It’s also the first clan of Japan, the Yamato clan—it was their symbol. It was the wa/Yamato/harmony, and it was the unifying clan of Japan.

When I was in Japan, I originally first learned in an American context from American teachers that the Japanese do things one way or another. In Japanese, the word for wrong is also the word for different, so therefore the Japanese believe that if you’re different you’re wrong. And this is, of course, a very ethnocentric way for us to interpret what this could possibly mean.

I go to Japan. It takes me a while. At first, I think everybody’s agreeing with me all the time, and it turns out people are just acknowledging that I’m saying something. And I learned that the conversation style of Japanese is harmony. It is harmony.

SHAMINI: So, they don’t need to call you out.

ANDREW: They don’t need to say I’m wrong. Actually, they could say I’m outside of the harmony, like they could say that something is off from the energy of our interaction. But the paradigm was so completely different than my paradigm of “You’re right or you’re wrong,” of you either agree with me or you don’t. And now I get into a space where it’s like you might not agree with me, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

SHAMINI: That’s the beginning of plural thought.

ANDREW: It blew my mind that you have an entire language built on this concept, whereas back here, I had learned some very clear, logical steps. You know, if I were to go into an academic argument with other people, I’d have the same rules of rhetoric as the “You’re right or you’re not,” not that “You might be right, but I don’t agree with you,” which recognizes, as you said, a plurality of truth, which is a very transdisciplinary concept.

SHAMINI: Right, because we were talking about this earlier: Transdisciplinarity, as we’re living it, is a set of literacies that have to do with the way we think about the language we use, and then—especially from just what you were saying earlier—the metacognition of the language.

Like, does a fish know it’s wet? Usually, the fish has no idea it’s wet, right? But I think transdisciplinarity is about the fish knowing it’s wet, so we have that self … that’s why reflexivity is so important as part of literacy. You normally think of literacy as the ability to read and write, to see patterns and sense-make. There’s a piece of literacy, I think, that transdisciplinarity brings, which is the literacy of metacognition. That’s a set of language tools that allows you to transcend “I’m right, you’re wrong,” and go into multiple realities.

ANDREW: And one step even further in the transdisciplinarity is a meta-metacognition. It’s epistemic cognition: What thinking cap am I using when I’m thinking? Or it’s an ontological cognition of what world am I occupying when I’m thinking in that world. Or, it’s a values-based cognition like when we zoom out to realize just how specifically we’ve created our worlds and how we’re still dictated and directed by the words that we’ve been taught to describe our own version of the world with.

SHAMINI: Yeah, we’re not so tightly bound in our skins in a way, right? Theater background: I’m thinking of the ability to truly play another person, another character. That kind of epistemic metacognition helps with empathy. These are the reasons I think everybody should get into transdisciplinary literacies. I think that’s what the world needs because we’re living in a very, very intricately interconnected, complex, and diverse space.

ANDREW: We haven’t talked about this too much before, but it also makes me think that this is one of those spots that’s really ready for integration between scholars who talk about ideas of intersectionalities. Because in intersectionalities, the trend that I see most of the time is people claiming a uniqueness based on the intersection of identities that exist as well. I’m this person according to these standards—it might be from a racial, ethnic, linguistic, immigration, gender, or sex status … you could go through all the levels where there’s an intersectional identity. (We all have intersectional identities.)

But having an intersectional identity where there’s extra work done to create coherence—that one unit has to understand both what it’s like to be international and a woman and a person of color, all those things at once. You have to develop multiple literacies within that. You have to understand what each of those identities entails because there’s a language associated with each of those things.

And I believe—and this, this is something that I know at a certain level of a conversation over coffee or wine, it comes out very clearly—people do code-switch. People understand there’s different language norms, there’s different ways that you interact with the world based on those intersectional identities. And you have to learn almost by instinct from a very young age how to approach these different levels of literacy, so that you can be an “in-group” when you need to be an “in-group,” and an “out-group” when you need to be an “out-group.” I think that trick—well it’s not just a trick, it’s a pretty sophisticated skill set.

SHAMINI: It’s a strong social phenomenon you see in many multilingual societies,

ANDREW: That’s transdisciplinary—in its very essence, what transdisciplinarity is.

SHAMINI: Crossing borders, back and forth.

ANDREW: There’s this opportunity here to tie together some things that we take for granted like, “Yes, I speak three languages and I speak two languages at home.” You should be doing transdisciplinary work because that same way of being is how you tackle something that involves a complex computational, policy, and communication problem.

SHAMINI: I wonder whether there are people who code-switch all the time in Malaysia. You just go on the street, and you’ll see Bahasa Malaysia with a bit of English thrown in and a Hokkien phrase or a Malay phrase, and it’s just normal. There’s a certain facility in knowing when to do it, when not to do it, and which codes to mix right to create real harmony. I connect with you on a human level because I’m code-switching. I wonder if people who do that from the time they’re young children: Do they just live in that world? Wouldn’t they be naturally drawn to doing that?

ANDREW: I think so. There are two things that I think. One is that development is important in this way because we learn linguistically so much when we’re younger and our brains are just really right .. that wiring can be permanently changed for bilingualism. When you’re older, it’s hard if there are new languages.

So, let’s say—and I don’t know this, I’m sure that there is literature out there on it—but if you know two languages growing up, because you’ve got two different tongues around the house that you’re learning, then I believe that you have the innate structures to then learn multiple languages.

SHAMINI: Chomsky would love you.

ANDREW: Exactly, but those two particular languages, or any two languages, now?

SHAMINI: I would think that you have more … I’ve seen this from experience, and I’ve seen a little research on this, that the more language systems your brain has acquired, the more you can actually hear differences, nuances, and new languages. So, you’re primed to pick up a third, fourth, and fifth because you already have two systems from the time you were young.

My own experience with this is when I first was in America and I asked for butter, and the waitress couldn’t understand me. So, I articulated it more clearly, butter, butter. And then finally I got it. “Oh, wait, budder. Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Which is the way you say it here, with the “D” sound in the middle. But what that was like was the research becoming real to me in that moment. It’s like tuning your ear to hear something, and you’re so tightly tuned that you can only hear budder, not butter. I thought, “Wow, that is so restrictive.”

ANDREW: I think that that is partly, as you mentioned, about applying theory based on what you grew up with and what you’re accustomed to. We teach languages as their own things from a very young age. We don’t teach transdisciplinarity studies from a young age. No, it’s true, you have to take a bunch of different subjects when you’re a kid, but we don’t really become fluent in a disciplinary language until we’re in higher ed.

Most everything else is like, if you’re a smart student, you’re usually challenging the teacher on “Why do we have to learn this?” Because you’re putting the onus on them about what’s directly applicable. So, when you get older and you’ve created a scaffold where this has meaning to you and this makes sense to you, you go all-in. But let’s say you’re now 25–30 or you’re going later into life, 45—you’ve now got some version of disciplinary fluency. Now you’re gonna have to become bilingual with another discipline.

SHAMINI: That’s hard.

ANDREW: That is so hard. And one of the things that I tend to believe is that if you don’t overwhelm yourself psychologically with having to learn another fluency, the first fluency is great. Like, if you can get a master’s level of fluency in a particular area, you’re solid. But then what you should do is get a conversational fluency in another…

SHAMINI: In something else …

ANDREW: Because that’ll give you the same kind of capacity for being able to tune to other languages. Because you start to see … once you’ve got two comparators, then you can create a third dimension out of it. And so, you could start applying, like, “Okay, well, this concept on the left side is similar enough to this concept on the right side. I think I can triangulate to figure out what this other concept would be on the right side …”

SHAMINI: I think what you said, about tuning your ear, tuning your mind, maybe tuning the way of thinking—I think what’s even more important than competency in producing is competency in receiving. Because when we work together, I need to be able to hear you and see you and not through my very rigid lens. I need to be able to make sense of butter and not expect budder. So, it’s reception.

And when I think about it in terms of how this plays out in the world when we work together, the biggest place where things fall down is, “I don’t hear you.” Or, I interpret what you’re saying in my … through my tuning. So when you say participation, I interpret it in one way. Then we are talking at cross-purposes.

One of the biggest places things fall down in collaboration is in language—what do you mean by this, what did I mean by that. It’s really different, and that’s why I think transdisciplinarity helps us to tune. So, when we say crossing boundaries, we mean really attuning yourself to being in a different space and listening, not through your filters, but through a broader—I don’t know, not even a filter, but to hear beyond what your language is.

ANDREW: You’re talking about these ideas that are called semantic and syntactic obstacles or boundaries themselves, and there isn’t a collaborative situation where you wouldn’t have those.

The thing that frustrates me in those collaborative scenarios that I can see happening more times than not is the ”ostriching,” where people are like, “Well, I’m gonna do my thing regardless of me understanding you. I’m not gonna try, my head’s gonna be firmly buried in the ground because I don’t want to put the energy or the vulnerability or the unknown out there because this is what I know how to do. My head’s very comfortable in the sand right in front of me. You do your thing, I’ll do my thing.”

SHAMINI: Right.

ANDREW: I think it comes back to an insecurity about—well, what is so hard about explaining your expectations of participation and what is so threatening about admitting you don’t know the same concept that we’re talking about with this.

SHAMINI: But sometimes we don’t even get there. No, we don’t even realize that I’m thinking one thing and you’re thinking another. We don’t realize the same word has different connotations and practices.

ANDREW: So, this brings me to why this has been on my mind so much this last week. I recently was out to dinner with a group of people, and we were talking about the state of different institutions of higher ed. And I had also recently heard on a podcast somebody mention a book where they were talking about the fall of confidence in institutions of this generation. It’s not an uncommon conversation. It’s one that a lot of conservative political minds have been talking about. It’s one that Peter Drucker, a long time ago, had touched upon by citing the importance of an institution in upholding a society.

And now in this dinner example, they were talking about … is there something going on with institutions? I said, “Yeah, our institutions, they’ve had a rough go this year.” And the person at the table who’d recently come out of a higher ed institution themselves in a very positive experience, their reply immediately was like, “F that institution, because it’s an institution.” And I was like, “Oh, this is real.”

But what it made me do—I wasn’t going to argue. Those feelings were those feelings. There’s probably reasonable criticism about a lot of things. But where was this coming from? Why is this concept of institutions so negative? And I talked to some political science folks around here, and yeah, there’s been a general lack of confidence, varying depending on which institution, for a while.

There’s been a lack of confidence in things like the military during certain eras, police in certain areas, hospitals, healthcare, and politics in general as in the state. There have been these kinds of concepts of institutions. But the word institution—when I think of an institution, if I want to peel back everything else and just imagine what is a metaphor that hits my mind when I hear the word institution, I think of someone who’s been institutionalized, held against their will in, for better or worse, a padded cell, like you lose your freedom. That’s what institution means.

SHAMINI: Sounds like a lot of school.

ANDREW: Some institutions have that harshness to them. There’s a lot of individual variance. But why do I hold that and how does that shape the reality of how I process anything related to an institution? Or for this person who was, you know, pretty much against institutions of higher ed—is that their same imagined idea of a padded cell being equivalent to an institution, and is that something that I am trapped in by my own concept? Or can I grow from that? Can I manipulate that?

SHAMINI: You can grow from that? Because now you are talking about it, right? So, you can question it, but many of us live with those concepts. We’ve never stopped to peel back the layers and go, “Oh.” For me, I think of a box with lots of corridors and avenues and right turns and wrong turns. That’s an institution. So that’s my image, and I wouldn’t have realized that that was my image. I think that’s where the danger is when you don’t know the images you embody, and your images come to you from a whole bunch of literature, lived experiences, whatever.

So, your past shapes your metaphor, and your metaphor shapes your current thoughts and future actions, and so that’s how we just keep going. Where I think we disrupt that is when we stop to say, “Oh, what is my metaphor?” And then you can stand next to it and look at it and say, “Why is this my metaphor?” And then, really importantly, you can ask, “What is another metaphor?” Once you can do that, you’re living loosely out there. You’re not tightly embodied in your past and your experience, and you have a little bit more empowerment to say, “What if we make an institution like this?” So, I think the power of future building is that ability to stop, look at what you contain, question what you contain, and make an explicit, intentional choice of what you want to do.

ANDREW: There was this class that I had the pleasure of teaching this year about transdisciplinary futures. That’s really where I came to appreciate the idea you’re talking about, and it’s called causal layered analysis. But essentially, it’s finding your metaphor. It’s getting at the core of how you imagine a future. It’s another kind of knowledge you have to tap into. It’s imagination and knowledge of what could be.

We’ve known for a long time that people, especially science fiction writers, do this kind of thing. But if you can put yourself into future space rather than present space, then you can tap into creativity in ways that you never could before, and it gives you the space to dig into, well, “What are those things shaping my concept of the future?” So, as you look at that metaphor—and I’ve joked that one of mine is Batman, you know that I think that problem-solving is like my image of Batman—what if I take something like the institution and change that metaphor from padded walls to maybe something like the pillars of functioning societies? What if I take it into the Peter Drucker space again?

And that made me think, “Wow, that is what Peter Drucker did.” I think his internal metaphor was something like this, and that’s why he had put so much energy into this idea of creating a functioning society, and it was going to be completed through institutions, through organizations. This was really the way to do it.

Now, not everybody feels that way or thinks that way, and some institutions don’t abide by those rules. And we’ve seen over time, different things happen that are both positive and negative. Some institutions are more on the side of the negative ideas, some positive, but I think that there is a prevailing rhetoric that institutions themselves have more of this negative metaphor. It doesn’t mean it’s undeserved. It doesn’t mean it’s deserved. I’m not weighing in on that, and I think that there is a lot of literature out there that is appropriately critical. What I haven’t seen enough of is this added power of understanding that, like anything, it’s a metaphor, and a metaphor is something that codifies an idea, but it’s also a linguistic tool. It’s also something that shapes reality, but you are ultimately the one who has the power to shape it.

SHAMINI: Yeah, and it’s really interesting in academia. But except in certain disciplines, metaphor and metaphorical thinking aren’t widely talked about or practiced. It’s something that seems to be in the realm of artists, you know, this ability to ask, “What if?” and what metaphor could substitute for the ones we have. It’s a huge leap of imagination.

Somehow, in so many disciplines that leap of imagination is sort of … there’s a tension between having the ability to do that and the rhetoric of your own discourse. You’re trapped in this rhetoric. There’s certain logic models. So, it’s not even a language. I think it is the patterns of thinking, the metaphors of our thought. George Lakoff talks about central metaphors. We really are not very aware of it.

When someone does a great job, you say, “Oh, you killed it” or “She really slayed that audience.” And you think for a minute, “Wait … there is a sense of dominance and dominating, even violence in how we win.” But metaphors are so lost to us that the words, unless you’re very metaphorically aware of them being like, “Ouch”—we don’t even notice that anymore.

So, for me, I think the dream is, could people really embrace that piece of themselves that we all have, the metaphorical language that we operate with all the time, but use it to build the metacognition, the awareness of it, to say, “Why this metaphor? How could it change? So, the institution being institutionalized—why this metaphor?” What would be a different shift? And for you, it was these pillars that were holding everything up, that were more supportive of that exercise …

ANDREW: I wish that that were my daily warm-up when I was in K–12. Can you imagine, instead of having to take apart sentences, to conjugate them and make them grammatically correct, that we did exercises and metaphorical thinking—not just for purposes of transdisciplinary literacy?

SHAMINI: No, it’s deep human literacy.

ANDREW: It’s something that really hits at the human experience of being able to connect with each other.

SHAMINI: You know, you mentioned science fiction writers, and that’s a piece of my past. I looked at science fiction to study humanity for my master’s. And they are so good at saying “What’s a very different metaphor for human relationships, or for peace or for war?” And the thing they do is then they make an actual, concrete picture of it in another alien world. But they’re very good at that transposition or translation of “the what” to the “what-if?” as an alternative to consider.

ANDREW: I’m glad that you brought up peace because I think that it’s really relevant now. I was of an era growing up—not that this is my nostalgia saying it’s better—in which peace had a certain metaphor with it, and it was like a dove and an olive branch, a very clear image. I’ve had more conversations in the last few years. I’ve even been to conferences on peace studies, and the term peace doesn’t exist without justice in a conversation anymore. I don’t think that’s a bad addition. I think it’s probably recognizing that peace without the other appropriate companions can be oppressive. And I’m also seeing that metaphor of peace change to mean oppression itself, which has really turned it on its head for me. If you’re talking about peace, then that itself is an oppressive movement. It represents the idea of a peacekeeper as a soldier who tells you not to fight, even though you’re being oppressed.

SHAMINI: Peace doesn’t … well, to me, what that sounds like is peace and pacifism being conflated.

ANDREW: Or peace is a way to just be quiet because you’re told that the status quo is okay. And I don’t think peace tells you that, either. Gandhi certainly wasn’t somebody who was saying everything was okay. But I do see that metaphor has shifted more than it was when I would talk to people a long time ago. And I do think it was more common to imagine a Kumbaya circle, right? Which was also not very sophisticated.

All that being said, metaphors change, and the meanings of words change, and we’re the ones who change those things. What I don’t see very much is the awareness that those things weren’t always that way. Just because more people can now see that peace can be an oppressive thing, that is what the core definition of peace becomes, but there’s context. That is what’s more popular right now, given that context and some relevant ideas, but 10 years from now, are we gonna do that?

SHAMINI: Who knows?

ANDREW: But that’s our power to change it. And that’s another transdisciplinary trick, to understand that words have meanings that we give them. I think it’s important for people becoming multi-literate, through transdisciplinary literacy as things change over time, to realize, “Oh, I’m the one who can flip an idea on its head. I can make the term peace sound like it’s oppressive. I can also make the term peace come across as something that is another pillar, or something that is really about thriving.”

SHAMINI: Gandhi? When you mentioned Gandhi and peace, I realized that what Gandhi did was turn the words struggle and revolution on their heads. There are certain images of struggle, revolution, and freedom, and what Gandhi did was civil disobedience. His struggle was to not fight, and he made it.

So, you can have an idea, and then you can … What he did was counter-map the word struggle. And instead of leading India into a conflict with the British, he created a new meaning for conflict, which is “peaceful” disobedience. You know, just protesting without fighting, leading people symbolically to the ocean, where the salt … and saying, “We can be self-sufficient.” Salt is the stuff of life. For him, it was a spinning wheel, and with salt he used symbolism to empower people with a different imagination of India. And it was so effective against the big empire of the British in getting freedom.

So that’s a whole different interpretation of what peace means that one person and his people managed to do. I think it’s possible. I think that was a kind of a transdisciplinary literacy in action, to be aware of how people normally read the pattern of peace and war, and to change it.

ANDREW: I came into something very similar but in a different context … they’re called reclaimed terms, that’s another version of this. In the LGBT community, I was of an era where my grandparents would use the term queer in a very different context than the way it’s used today. Today, you see the term queer, it’s queer studies.

SHAMINI: It’s been empowered.

ANDREW: It’s a reclaimed term. From my understanding, it became a reclaimed term in the 90s. It was one of these terms that was like, “Okay, if you’re going to use this derogatorily toward me, I’m going to take it and tell you what it means. It means me, and I’m going to say it first, and not you.” And it really rose out of the ACT UP era of AIDS activism, where people were “here and queer.” This was a moment where it became really empowering again, as you said.

And today, you find an entire generation of people who first identify as queer, and then specifically with another LGBT term on there. But it has become the dominant form of our conversation around identifying.

SHAMINI: It’s been reimagined.

ANDREW: It has been, completely, and that was done by people who intentionally changed the structure. It became more inclusive and empowering. It took those kinds of linguistic turns. Again, they’re transdisciplinary tools.

SHAMINI: And the word feminine—remember in the 80s the power dressing, the shoulder pads? You had to be like a man dressed like a man to have the power of a man. And then it was a bunch of women who said, “No, no, being feminine is not antithetical to being a leader.” And that changed the fashions as well as their attitude. So, they rescued the word feminine from being weak and lady-like to being just who you are.

ANDREW: So, I have a question now that we’ve established that there’s some power with words, a reality construction that takes place, metaphorical thinking that goes along with it, and ultimately all this is a transdisciplinary tool set. You’re folding in ontology and epistemology when you do this and you’re the one creating it.

So, if we had a choice to find a different metaphor than what we have now, I want to examine the term education.

SHAMINI: Ah, good one.

ANDREW: Okay, so education, what does that term metaphorically feel like? Is it a Jungian image or some kind of archetype, or what sits there for you with education?

SHAMINI: Okay, so I actually asked this of my students. It’s an exercise we do in class. I say, “Draw education.” And I get all kinds of drawings. The one that I get for myself, this is, but this is because of maybe many years of thinking about it—for me, the imagery around education is really about crafting.

So, I see somebody painting or actually, for me, a lot of it is a performance on stage. That’s education. That’s my image. But I came to it after a long set of turns of metaphors. One example I’ll give you that a lot of people provide is, “Oh, education is like growing a garden.”

ANDREW: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one.

SHAMINI: Then when you stop and say, “Now find where your metaphor breaks,” you suddenly go, “Wait a minute. The plants are passive and being done to by the gardener, the teacher. Okay, no, I don’t agree with that. I want children to be active.” So, then you say, “Okay, maybe the metaphor is not a garden,” or you try to rescue the metaphor: “Oh, well, you know, the plants are also active. They do photosynthesis, etc., but there’s still a teacher in the middle.”

One of my students shifted it entirely and said, “No, it’s a community garden, and all the students are planting their own plots, and the teacher facilitates.” That was a complete shift away from “the teacher in the middle” because the central metaphor of education is “authority in the middle” and a power dynamic. What this student did by making a community garden was break the deeper structure of the metaphor, and I think that’s the kind of activity we should be doing, especially with education. I think we should really ask ourselves what drives institutions.

ANDREW: … I’m much less sophisticated than you in having a metaphor for education. I wasn’t even at the level of the garden. My image in my head is a kid raising his hand. That’s the image of what education is to me. And it’s funny because if you were to ask me how I would approach teaching, it would be, “I teach whoever wants to be there.” Clearly, I’m referencing that kid who is raising their hand, because I’m assuming the engagement is there already. They want to know more because they’re with me every minute that I’m speaking. And I can just keep throwing more breadcrumbs of knowledge to them for them to collect as they’re raising their hand.

When I was in Japan again, I had some interesting stints. I was a summer camp counselor there to teach English to a bunch of, I think, 11-year-olds at some point. I had done some work in elementary school classrooms as quite an education. Nobody raises their hand in Japan in the classroom. It’s not something you do. The teacher will call on you, yes, but you don’t raise your hand.

Usually, that’s a very high-intensity situation when you’re being called on and it seems humiliating for students to have to go through that because now they have to perform. It’s another side to it. But one thing I noticed from especially young Japanese children in the classroom is that it’s not the formal routine of “Will you show us how to do the math problem or write a letter?” It was more like there were things like lunchtime, or at the end of the day, and everybody had a different duty for them.

You had some people helping serve the food. You had some people helping to do the cleanup. You rotated jobs, and everybody learned everything about every position as a part of what they did. And their early education was amazing because you had kids who could cook. Coming out of eight years old, you knew how to do some basic things. It wasn’t like this, I’m sure, in every school. It was an experience that I had, but that made me think really differently about education because the metaphor now, the image, is different. It’s not the kid raising their hand anymore.

SHAMINI: What did it become?

ANDREW: It was this idea of having everybody learn what the other is doing. It was much more about like, “This week you’re this but next week you’re changing position.”

SHAMINI: And you’re all collaborating.

ANDREW: And you all have to do it together, otherwise it doesn’t work. So that was a really different idea, and it also shaped the way I think of education now as a teacher.

SHAMINI: You see, this is so powerful. You have a significant experience like that. I know I came to my idea of education after many years of teaching. But if I go back to the image thrust on me as I was growing up, it was, “Sit, look forward, pay attention, take notes with the paper vertically oriented,” which I never did, and always got me into trouble. So, education was very much like being institutionalized because you were being taught the norms, practices, and mores of what learning and teaching are. And very quickly, I lost that. I hated school.

ANDREW: And it’s interesting, you said the institution of education. And going back to the idea of institution, I think there’s a healthy conflict between the inspiration for an institution and the actual structure and sustainability of an institution.

If an institution had its own will, no matter what was in there, it’s for its own self-preservation, and it may or may not keep the original inspiration and keep itself solidified and stable. So, a democracy might have looked like something from the beginning, but what it looks like in its sustenance, in its long-term course—for that, we can still call it a democracy? Is it really functioning based on its original inspiration?

SHAMINI: Probably not, because it’s like getting older, you’re just not …

ANDREW: Well, that’s going back to the transdisciplinary space. You still have the power to do something about that. And I think for an institution like education, I definitely know what it’s like to have to write on the chalkboard. I have a more traditional upbringing there. So, having more tradition, which isn’t terrible in a lot of ways, involved teacher’s manuals and kind of a prescriptive version of transmission model learning.

SHAMINI: Yeah, tradition isn’t a bad thing. Ritual isn’t a bad thing. Norms aren’t a bad thing, except when used mindlessly. When it is living in your classroom and it no longer aligns with the people who are there with you, you have to kind of break the rule a little. And that’s adaptation. And I think institutions that are adaptive in that responsive way, not a reactive way, and with intention, can evolve into new forms that are maybe healthier and certainly better aligned with their realities at the moment.

ANDREW: So, if we were to take education as an institution and create a metaphor for that, for the future, not for now, but for the future—what’s one we could use? Let’s unpack it and see what it would look like.

SHAMINI: I always dream of education being a community of practice … I’m very influenced by someone like Ferreri, where the teacher’s a learner and the learner’s a teacher. So, it’s co-creative. There is, of course, a prescribed curriculum, but much depends on what we end up doing in the classroom.

So, the metaphor for that is really about a creative process, like a bunch of artists writing a thing, creating a picture, or building a tapestry. There’s a production of something. It’s done collaboratively with all the artists in the room. So, for me, that metaphor is an artistic process that’s co-creative between the learners and the facilitators. And if all schools could be like that—I mean, that’s my dream.

ANDREW: I think we could construct that kind of …

SHAMINI: Well, we’re trying with the Master of Arts in Transdisciplinary Analysis (MATA).

ANDREW: Not only are we trying in MATA, I also think it’s not just for education. All these institutions have these capacities to them. If we can change … if we can just think about one more metaphor for anything that isn’t working, for anything that we can see from the outside is stuck in its way of being …

There’s this very cynical approach we can take and say, “Look at the world that was left to us. Look at how many awful things we have to deal with. I am not going to interact because there’s no point in it anyway.” And I’m saying the opposite is true. Like every time you see something that isn’t right, you actually have far more power than you thought.

SHAMINI: Because it’s ripe for change.

ANDREW: Because part of the problem is you think that there’s a system of problems that’s insurmountable. But because it’s a system of problems, and we have the tools to work within systems much better than what we’re usually explicitly made aware of—that’s what we’re trying to really get across not only in our master’s curriculum but also across CGU in a lot of different ways.

And I think a lot of educational spaces are trying to do this, too. There’s a lot of educators who feel very similarly that, look, if you get the tools of a system, then you can change systems. You could reinvent a system. And one of the tools of a system is the metaphor in which that system was built. It’s like the skeleton key that gets you in the door. Then you can start changing a system from that kind of engineering as a systems engineer would by changing the paradigm of the system, by changing the inspiration and the purpose of the system. That’s when you make huge changes to it because it gives you the entire blueprint of what you need to work with and how you need to make it.

If we get caught up in the details of like, “I would only change my system if my boss weren’t so terrible to me, I’d only change my system…,” that’s not true—by the way, I like my boss, but in case you’re listening, Michelle, I really do like you.

But these are things we can get really caught up on. I could change the system if I had more resources, change the system if I had any power myself. Those things have truth to them, but it’s assuming a set of tools that are actually not systems. … Language is a systems tool, right? And that’s one we don’t acknowledge appropriately enough.

SHAMINI: Yeah, we don’t. I think you’re right. When I teach my pedagogy class, we talk about changing the system, and there’s also the level at which you can effect a change. So, your boss may be mean, but that’s not really meanness and niceness as a systems tool. Within the spaces in which you do work and have some agency, you can do a lot despite the lack of resources, or the meanness, etc., those things are not really systems tools. So, for me, it’s like, “I can’t change the whole educational system and its assessment of students and how unfair and unjust it is, but I can make that change in my classroom.”

ANDREW: I see all the time in an administrative space when people are exhibiting behaviors of backing up … they’re not engaging, they’re not leaning in, like it’s full-on … I’m seeing all the reactions of backing away. And it’s really common, and it usually takes the form of coming up with all the ways something won’t work and all the dangers of doing something. And it isn’t that hard to figure out what all the dangers of something are. In fact, there’s so many of them, and I’m an anxious person myself, so my mind is constantly assessing what could possibly go wrong and what it would look like. So, you get a lot of empathy from me on that point.

But what I also noticed from that is you have the option to do the inverse and engage and lean in and do those things that force us to say, “What would it look like if I were to construct something that’d be a solution in this system? What if I were to do something? What would my actions be?” That one, I have to prompt out of people a lot more. I’ll do it a lot with …

I was on a nonprofit board for a bit, and I could see whenever there was a change coming …

SHAMINI: Change is frightening.

ANDREW: Very frightening. And so, everyone would be like, “I don’t think it’s worth it.” That’s the first response. “I don’t think it’s worth it.” What is it worth? You have a metaphor that you have based on your concept of what that cost is, that something is going to involve a green sign with a money bag on it. It’s going to be your time. It’s going to be a loss of sorts because change is a loss. What is going on in your mind? Because I want us to flip the metaphor for a second and say what could possibly be. And if we can turn that metaphor into what could possibly be and find something that is really inspiring to all of us, then maybe you can weigh the cost as a secondary measure.

SHAMINI: Yeah, we shouldn’t weigh the cost. Do a cost analysis …

ANDREW: Not first, right?

SHAMINI: Appreciative inquiry starts with dreaming.

ANDREW: That’s right.

SHAMINI: And this thing, this courage to … imagination takes courage. To be able to go there in your imagination and ask, “What if?” and not run away too quickly. The other thing is the pause. Stay a while with your imagination before you go and do the cost-benefit analysis. I think that’s really important, especially today when everything is changing. And change always seems to be an either/or thing. It’s either going to be good or bad, and we’re stuck in the either/or. It doesn’t work, that’s too binary.

ANDREW: I’ll add one more piece. I think being cynical to that level is a luxury we don’t have anymore. I think it’s really nice to have the status quo as a default by not doing anything when the status quo is very comfortable. But as you pointed out, for like a space of aporia, most people are not comfortable in aporia.

SHAMINI: No, it’s awful not to know. It’s awful to be in ambiguity and to be with unknown unknowns, that’s terrible.

ANDREW: Sometimes it’s threatening, even.

SHAMINI: So, here’s a metaphor that will change that: play. Because play, the way kids really play, is full of unknowns and maybes and what-ifs. Play doesn’t have a status quo, really. We’re breaking the rules all the time, and it’s kind of a delightful terror, right?

But we lose that very quickly. What if we could get that back, and what if there was more playfulness with imagination, like in a boardroom? That would be a very different approach. I think we need more of it today.

ANDREW: I do, too. I’ll go back to this, that idea of lingualisms and bilingualism, multi-lingualisms and literacies, and even a bio-musicality. These ideas that your mind doesn’t have to be stuck in one way of being. So many of us, by our very existence, in the identities that we have that are intersectional between the different spaces we occupy, have already been prepared to handle the world that we’ve been in. So, what is stopping us?

SHAMINI: I don’t know.

ANDREW: It’s that wiring to be applied to the world …

SHAMINI: I think it’s fear. We’ve been socialized to fear. Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” But we’ve been socialized to fear these multitudes.

ANDREW: Yeah, and in a secret life, not for public consumption.

SHAMINI; And the ability to think in all these different ways that many of us naturally have. We’re code-switching and register-switching all the time. But then when it comes to decision making, we go back into that little straitjacket of either this or that. This is the status quo, and we become very, very fearful.

So, I think one of the biggest things people could learn is to find courage … not to lose the fear. I think that was a book, Feel the Fear, and Do It Anyway—not to lose the fear, but to have the courage to imagine. I think the courage to imagine is gold. It’s so powerful in your personal life, but also in this collaborative social life that we need if we want a better world.

ANDREW: And I think that we should also seize that idea that is said more than I care to remember, that words matter. They do, but “words matter” doesn’t mean it’s a place for critique. Words matter is the beginning. Words matter means that now it’s your turn to create the meanings of those words. It doesn’t mean that you chose the wrong one, and therefore …

SHAMINI: Words matter because what the word means to you matters.

ANDREW: That’s why it matters. You create the mattering. And there are better words, and there are points of negotiation and agreement. All this is true, and sometimes words are quite damaging. That’s also true. Words matter because of how you use them, how you receive them, and how you create worlds around them.

And that is why transdisciplinarity is so ironically and paradoxically powerful. Because reactions to the term transdisciplinary often are like, “What do you mean?” It’s many syllables! It sounds like something that’s thrown around as just a keyword. But the truth is, it has this meaning embedded that we’re trying to redefine. We’re trying to establish one of the many meanings of transdisciplinary studies. That is getting at the essence of any disciplinary study, and the ability to travel between disciplinary levels and disciplinary spaces because that set of literacies is more important.

SHAMINI: I think so. Yeah, that’s much more important than any specific literacy. It’s like transdisciplinarity is metacognitive sense-making. All of us sense-make but I think what transdisciplinarity, in particular, as a set of literacy tools allows us to do is that epistemic metacognition. That is important. If all of us could do that, sit around the table and maybe find new ways to transcend problems—I think world-building needs that.

ANDREW: In the transdisciplinary movement … one of the major contributions is taking tools of metaphysics and philosophy and applying them to how we handle ourselves in the world. It’s understanding that an ontological or epistemological space is one that we need to have appropriate scalpels for operating on. Some of those scalpels are linguistic tools from other disciplines.

Nothing in transdisciplinarity is that original. Everything is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. But it is this vessel upon which we can pass through different disciplinary spaces and non-disciplinary spaces. That’s why it’s so helpful to do this because otherwise, we’re going to absorb all of these limiting realities defined by words whose meanings change over time. Absolutely, it’s all the spaces.

But sometimes we want to be the ones in charge of that meaning change. Sometimes we’re the ones who want to have that power and make those changes. You can see and imagine a better world, and that’s where I think there are so many cool opportunities to study these kinds of things now when we’re noticing the breakdown in our traditional systems.

SHAMINI: Yeah, I think so too. So, we need a course in transdisciplinary literacy.

ANDREW: I like that idea.

SHAMINI: I volunteer to teach it.

ANDREW: Thank you, Shamini! Well, we hope that we get students who are interested. We hope we get community members interested in these kinds of things, and we hope to keep the conversation going as we are in these post-normal times and realizing that the prepackaged tool sets we have aren’t necessarily the ones to be using as much as we have been using them. We have all these other tools that it’s time to unwrap and that we can apply to these spaces as well.

SHAMINI: I think so, too.

ANDREW: Thank you so much for your time today. It’s always fun talking to you.

SHAMINI: This was fun for me, really: linguistics, language meaning, patterns, all good stuff.

ANDREW: And boundary crossing!

SHAMINI: And boundary crossing.

Thanks so much. And thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of PostNormal Times. Thanks to our guest, and thanks to our support from Claremont Graduate University. If you enjoyed boundary crossing with us and want to hear more, make sure you follow us, spread the word, and tune in to our next episode.