Cinema-Based Education
A synopsis of my Master's thesis, on which this movie school and pilot project are based, can be broken down into three main areas.
The first area involves using motion pictures or movies as the primary means of instruction as well as a common ground and springboard for continued learning and cooperative endeavors.
The major reasons why movies are especially suited for such a role include:
Movies can expose and impart a lot of information in a short amount of time and therefore meet the demands and opportunities of the Information Age.
We are biologically built to learn from images; motion pictures provide a more direct link to cognitive understanding and emotional connection than written text.
Movies provide the opportunity to develop a variety of skills and abilities ranging from visual and critical viewing, to empathic understanding and multicultural competence.
In watching movies together we have a common experience and are better bonded as a community. Movies are our modern day storytellers and help us to make sense of our lives.
Movies are emotionally engaging, inspire further learning, and fun to watch.
The second main area of my thesis involves certain pedagogical ideas and themes that serve to direct and define the approach of Manitou Movie School. These include:
A pedagogy of wholeness wherein learning is placed in context and made immediately relevant to the learner. The student is more than a vessel to be filled with knowledge.
Learner empowerment, giving students more control and options in their education, allowing them to construct their own knowledge. Learner empowerment also grows from critical thinking and reading, discussion and disagreement, autonomy, student-directed study and cooperative project-based learning.
Classroom as community and democratization of instruction whereby learning is a shared endeavor, knowledge is explored and negotiated as a group, and the classroom environment and approach reflects the world we wish to create.
Pedagogical vigilence and committment to social progress, betterment of the social condition and helping to create the world that is "not yet." The classroom as crucible for personal and social transformation.
Fostering development of the global or transnational citizen and community, a diverse yet integrated humanity harmoniously connected with each other and their natural environment.
Establishing and practicing a novel pedagogical approach based on the conjoinment of two complimentary approaches termed ecopedogogy and ecomedicine.
The third main area of my Master's thesis involves a thesis within a thesis, what I called a my thesis of the garnish. This thesis states that the consumption of cannabis by our species appears necessary to gain whole brain balance, or what I call bi-hemispheric resonance.
This thesis is based on the premise that our species and our culture, as a whole and on average, suffers from a neuropsychological imbalance wherein our left cerebral hemisphere, or left-brain, dominates our worldview and lifestyle at the expense of the worldview as presented by the right-brain.
This left-hemispheric dominance is presumably the result of thousands of years of language and technological development (which are primarily left-brain specialties) and continues to be reinforced by schools and societal demands for these left-brain functions. I call this reinforcement of left-brain dominance unilateral cerebral preferencing.
My thesis proposes that cannabis, likely through some modulatory effect of the corpus callosum, can give us ready access to the right-brain worldview, which provides a more holistic, integrated, relationship-based, process-oriented way of looking at life.
Furthermore I suggest this other worldview, indeed this way of being in the world as offered by the right-brain, is exactly what our species needs to get us out of our current fix, which boils down to a deep and perverse separation/alienation between the human and its natural environment.
Importantly, left and right-brain argument aside, I propose a mindful, shamanically-oriented approach to cannabis use that utilizes the cannabis-induced state of consciousness (what I call cannabis consciousness) as a means to better and more fully understand ourselves and our world.
For a partial listing of references and work supporting each of these three main areas of my thesis go here.
My Ideal School/Classroom
Cannabis as a Catalyst to Restore Balance
