1. The Courage to Teach: Whitehead, Emotion, and the Adventure of Ideas

• Main Author: Howard Robert Woodhouse
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2012-06-01
• Series: Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching
• Online Access: https://celt.uwindsor.ca/index.php/CELT/article/view/3353

The importance of moral courage to teaching and learning has been recognized by a number of authors.  The process pedagogy of Alfred North Whitehead proposes that emotion is central to experience and to the imaginative questioning which enables learning and the ability to stand up for one’s beliefs.  Faculty who wish to connect with their students should recognize this fact lest ideas become “inert.”  In contrast, process pedagogy encourages a holistic, cyclical approach in which students and faculty engage in the “adventure of ideas” as a balance between freedom and self-discipline.  This search for new ideals involves certain risks, as both a recent example of alternative higher education and Whitehead’s own vision of the university show.  Process pedagogy’s synthesis of the emotional and intellectual can spur imaginative critique and the capacity to put one’s ideas into practice.