My Educational Philosophy

Hugh M. Lewis, Ph.D.

My educational philosophy has been influenced by my training, education, experiences, research and writing over the years. I have entered education professionally in strong part because it is necessary in the world today to promote alternative human development, and education remains at the center of this critical issue. From the standpoint of the question of a student centered (construed in class as "constructivist") and a subject-centered approach (construed as behaviorist), I would claim that I would adopt a working balance between both approaches. I would expect to also develop a "class centered" approach that deals with the class as a whole system or in part as components of a system that is designed for learning. Learning is cooperative in the context of the school and even the entire society in which learning is promoted.

From a metaphysical point of view, I have adopted and developed theory in relation to various fields of the sciences, and have a strong naturalistic inclination towards knowledge and our understanding of reality. I see the classroom, the students, and the society in which the school is situated as part of a complex series of interacting processes that achieves and maintains over time a dynamic equilibrium between variables.

From an epistemological point of view, human apprehension of reality is symbolic and constructed socially, culturally and psychologically. Doctoral and post-doctoral research in symbolic framing, issues relating to cognitive development and acquisition, has provided me a body of empirically robust methods that are directly applicable to the challenges of promoting learning upon a number of levels. It has provided me the foundation for the development of active approaches upon a number of levels, as well as for a theoretical framework by which to interpret and organize approaches.

Aesthetically, because I have been an artist, and remain so, I believe strongly in the development of human creativity through a variety of means in the development of personality and character, as well as intelligence. I believe also that there is a natural aesthetic in the appreciation of nature, in all its verities and aspects. Even death, as it is said, becomes the mother of beauty.

From a humanistic point of view, I believe each student remains a unique individual with keen intelligence, talent and experience that remains dormant until awoken by the right conditions that a teacher in an effective learning environment may provide. Mentoring relationships remains, even for very tiny babies, a critical component to the human mediation of experience. The challenge in a classroom for a teacher with 30+ individuals to teach on a daily basis is to learn and understand the needs, interests and personalities of each child in order that the teacher may most effectively assist them.

My choice in coming to Azusa Pacific University (APU) was not that I am a very religious person. I was born and raised within the Methodist church. After my father died, our family fell apart and we did not any longer go to church. Through anthropology, I have studied various religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and spirit animism, and even various aspects of Christianity itself. I had the opportunity to attend a teacher program through a secular public university. I chose APU because, I believe at the heart of the issue of human development, must be a fundamental doctrine of love, charity, forgiveness, tolerance and trust. This doctrine becomes reflected in how people deal with one another on a day to day basis, and how they interpret the actions of people. I have determined that APU probably provides a kind of humanistic framework and approach toward education that would probably be lacking in other programs. I found this to be true of my work in China, with the realization that at the core of most human development issues are fundamental commitments, or a lack of commitment, as the case may be, to certain core value orientations that are implicit to one's attitudes, relations and behavior in the world. China has been a world in which religion has been outlawed for more than 50 years now, and its people have paid for this a price, the cost of their souls, that is incalculable by any earthly standards.

Ethically I am bound by my profession to behave in certain ways in certain contexts in relation to people with whom I work. I take these professional obligations quite seriously and strongly, regardless of whether they are interpreted or shared the same way be other in my field of study or not. This sense of ethics would extend to a fundamental respect and appreciation of the student in the classroom.

Education is no longer just vital to the perpetuation of our system, our cultural way of life or for the achievement of personal success in life. It is critical for the future of all of humanity. Finally, to conclude this brief statement of my educational philosophy as this has so far developed, I will recite the first four lines of Walt Whitman's poem There Was A Child Went Forth:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.