(Notes from Depth Education Design course)
“Depth Education is defined as a mode of engagement designed to prompt us to dig deeper, to relate wider, and to show up differently.
It asks us to disinvest from harmful desires, to activate accountability and responsibility before will (not as an intellectual choice or a transactional calculation), and to become open to being taught by the world in unexpected ways. It draws attention to the 3 Ms of the matter (both visible and invisible), motion and mystery of the wider metabolism we are embedded in.
As a mode of inquiry, it foregrounds complexity, indeterminacy and emergence and it invites all of us to sit with difficulties; to unpack investments; to confront resistance; to disarm affective land mines; to relate beyond meaning, identity, and understanding; and to rationally explore the limits of rationality.
Ultimately, depth education is about building the collective “stomach” to confront and compost the literal and metaphorical “shit” we have inherited and contribute to without throwing up, throwing a tantrum or throwing in the towel. It is about learning to face humanity within and around us in all its spectrum and complexity: the good, the bad, the broken, the messy and the messed up.
In the house of modernity, we are taught to collapse multiple layers of complexity into a single layer, imposing a narrative of coherence, to keep things manageable and to enjoy a sense of certainty, predictability and control. This involves editing out elements that do not fit this narrative and policing its borders.
When this two-dimensional perception encounters a reality of exponential complexity, it creates a pressure cooker scenario. In this context, much of our time and energy are spent containing the pressure of a world in rapid motion that defies established narratives of reality and desires and impulses to have reality fit these narratives.
This situation breeds anxiety, which can easily morph into depression, despair and scapegoating, where we misdirect our anger, frustration and resentment and start turning against each other, often violently.
Depth Education aims to unflatten our perception of the world, which modernity has conditioned to remain in two dimensions, which manifests as a world organized around hierarchical binaries that fit in “either/or” boxes. This unflattening process is often initially painful and difficult, as it exposes foreclosures—things we need to repress to keep reality flat (mono-layered) and our narratives coherent.
Given the extent and force majeure of our socialization within modernity, we all have parts of ourselves that crave flatness along with certainty, control, predictability and coherence. We all have plenty of work to do. That’s why, to be sustaining and sustainable, Depth Education asks us to move holding (self)compassion in one hand and (multiple forms of) accountability in the other hand, at all times. Drop one, and we lose the plot.
However, beyond attempts at descriptions and definitions, Depth Education is fundamentally a dancing entity that takes different shapes and forms depending on who it is dancing with, the songs and rhythms that it is playing to, the costumes and props available, and the resulting choreography.
This choreography teaches us the steps to move from two dimensions (flat) to three dimensions (depth), while gesturing towards more dimensions that we cannot (yet) collectively physically experience. In this sense, a useful image for Depth Education may be that of a tesseract in motion.”