Elective Units: outlines and dates

Oases graduate school provides a learning community and space in which participants can engage with processes of exploration and learning, using multiple ways of knowing and learning.

Oases stands for the organic, integration of the aesthetic, social, ecological and spiritual.  We are committed to integrative and transformative approaches to learning. The majority of participant’s enrol in the masters, graduate diploma or graduate certificate, but we are offering the following units as single subject for those who wish to get a taste of oases learning without formal enrolment in the whole program.

Eco-literacy (working with Wendy Hopkins)

Monday March 1 (at the Augustine Centre),

Sunday and Monday May 2 and 3 (Retreat at Kangaroo Ground on the Yarra River),

Saturday June 26 (at the Augustine Centre)

In this unit we'll consciously inhabit and explore the Ecological...the patterns, relationships and interconnectedness of ecology; our collective home. We'll do this through observation, understanding and experiential immersion, using our whole-body intelligences, eg intellectual, emotional, sensory, kinaesthetic. By focusing on a specific aspect of an Ecosystem, by regularly visiting a place of your choice, and through workshops that'll bring out our collective wisdom...we'll discover and uncover our own eco-literacy...then explore how we'll live and act from this new place of knowing.

Wendy Hopkins will draw on her explorations and experiences in eco-literacy, group facilitation, social ecology, deep ecology, science and wonder (and of course, being a human immersed in and part of nature!). And together we'll draw on the experiences and wisdom of all participants, and the 'natural world' around us.

Legitimate knowledge: the struggle for science (that most scientists don't know) (working with Frank Fisher)

August 2, September 12, October 8, November 8

Twenty years ago, the great Deakin University sociologist Max Charlesworth and colleagues wrote a book about Gus Nossal's Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. They sketched a comprehensive picture of the nitty gritty reality of the making of ‘legitimate knowledge’. However, sadly, few scientists, few even of WEHI's own scientists would have read the book let alone reckoned that it might be worth reading someday. And that, in a sense, is the greatest problem the scientific project has: a failure to understand its own nature even among its own practitioners. It means that the nexus between science and politics is not understood and that since the failure extends to scientists themselves, they ‘oversell’ their science and thereby demean it - profoundly. ANU sociologist Eva Etzioni-Halevy wrote an excellent, if much unrecognised, piece on just this ... 25 years ago!

This course examines the nature of science as a human (social) project. It aims to make science stronger and more legitimate through the respect that understanding its nature as the most rigorous internally coherent body of knowledge yet developed, can give.

Movement, Ritual and Society  (Working with Julia Catton)

March 26, 27, 28, April 25

Rituals and habitual patterns are very important. This statement applies to movement patterns as much as speech patterns. Teachers, group leaders, ministers of religion can benefit from being able to recognize the difference between ritual or habitual, traditional or customary, patterns of movement, and by being alert to the possible impact on behaviour of a change in these patterns.

In fact the consideration and understanding of patterns of movement is important for anyone planning to lead a group, or when planning any kind of group intervention. When exploring this subject as a student you can refer to the discipline of Social Psychology and to works within the field of Ethnographic Enquiry. In addition there is much to be learnt by observation and careful analysis.You can ask, what are the various motives behind a particular ritual movement? Or question, what is the benefit of a habitual pattern of action for an individual? Or, one can explore the ethical impact on a group of people of a change in their traditional ways of interacting?

Verbal patterns are studied carefully from the time we learn to read at school. But patterns of movement, used all the time in social interactions, are often adopted without us realizing that we are responding with great significance to a pattern initiated by another.

When we learn a habitual or ritual movement, or make changes to it, it adds to the pattern's importance. Changes to it are important because any change made to a pattern of movement can be seen as unexpected, creative or subversive. Some may want to hold onto a traditional pattern of action with a belligerent intensity. But usually having an action model, soundly based on present needs, is what is needed. Plus, if a change of behaviour involves an easily recognizable movement pattern, it can ease the adoption of other aspects of change.

Revitalizing Words and Language (working with Joan Sheridan, Tricia Hiley and Jacques Boulet)

August 1, September 13 October 9, November 7

This unit gives you the opportunity to liven up your language, through writing and speaking, exploring ways of expressing the living, dynamic nature of integrative and transformative practice and experiencing the reverberation of meaning of which Bachelard speaks, with the outcome being “texts that are vital” (Richardson).

We will commence this course by considering the ontological functions of language.  We will examine the ancient system of rhetoric and how it is used to form the classic paradigms of our contemporary society. Using contemporary texts the persuasive power of rhetoric and its argumentative force will be demonstrated. We will then consider how our world has been invented with language, paying special attention to historical and contemporary social, political and psychological discourse. Words, especially in their normal usages, support and sustain the text as it is currently written (including the underlying cultural subtext).

In this unit we will also look at the origins of words and how their meanings have ‘slipped’, as well as words we have transplanted from one context to another, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Further, we explore those times when we seem to have no language with which to describe a phenomenon, an experience or an insight. We will explore these times and spaces as epistemological silences and consider both the epistemology which makes this so and the possibilities for understanding those silences and ‘re-languaging’ them, finding words and ways to express oneself in these times. Writing traditionally ‘fixes thought on paper’, externalizing what is internal. We will explore writing as method, with ‘methodology’ inextricable from ‘experience’ and vice versa, so closely woven as to be indistinguishable. In assignments, you will be asked to reconnect with the auditory nature of words, letting your ‘self’ linger a little, wandering with the words, feeling their flow, fullness and fragility.

Synapse: Creating Connections: Bridging spaces between Knowledge (working with Eleni Rivers, Catherine van Wilgenberg and Jenni Goricanec).

May 9 & 10 , June 13 & 14

This unit will take place at MIECAT (The Melbourne Institute for Experiential and Creative Arts Therapies, 15 Victoria Street, Fitzroy).

An aesthetic experience is the spark of enlightenment or connection in an 'Aha’ moment when things make sense and everything becomes clear! Such a moment has been described by James Joyce as 'aesthetic arrest'.

Joseph Campbell helped to make the idea known, in his lectures on Joyce: “The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object....you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest.... The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”(James Joyce, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’).

This program will move participants to create their own bridges between many and varied ways of knowing, crossing disciplinary divides between art, science and spirituality/religion. Through a series of visual explorations and using a variety of materials, participants will become familiar with a holistic approach to aesthetics by way of drawing, painting, experimentation with prisms and map making.

Entering into the aesthetic experience opens up creativity which will be brought into physical form through individual and group projects. Shared portals create cultural connections across discipline, language and culture.