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Pagans are Teaching Academia a Thing or Two! by Amethyst Funny thing happened on the way to finishing my PhD thesis. I realised that as Pagans we’re streaks ahead of the research boffins in academia. The tertiary sector may be full of professors and other similarly titled, knowledgeable academics who build and publish theories on a plethora of topics but when it comes to understanding how people learn with their gut instinct, Pagans are the clear and outright experts! I’ve been a practicing Wiccan for several years and I’ve been teaching Wicca for quite some time as well. Couple that with my career as a training manager in which I’ve been designing training systems for adults in the workplace for over twenty years and it was pretty obvious what my topic for my doctoral thesis would be. I decided to explore how Wiccans and Witches learn about Wicca and how they learn to be Wiccans. But I didn’t want to just find out about how we learn to cast circles or learn about magick, I wanted to go deeper than that. Learning about the ways to cast circles, create magick and all that stuff exercises our brains, it’s cognitive, it’s “head stuff”. The real learning for a Wiccan comes from experiencing Wicca, from “doing” and “being” a Wiccan. Questions like, “How do you know when magick has worked?” or “How do you know the messages you got from a meditation were real and not something your head just made up?” This isn’t learning using your brain, this is learning using your gut instinct, your heart, the essence of who you are. It’s learning with your soul. The academic theorists haven’t cottoned on to that yet and still focus heavily on learning theories based on cognition, behaviourism or humanism so there are no theories on how we learn with our instincts. Enter my doctoral research! Over a four year period I followed as many Wiccans and Witches as I could in my then home town of Perth, Western Australia and watched them and asked them how they learnt to be Wiccans. The end result was obvious to me and to most Pagans but not so to academia. We learn using our hearts, our instincts and our souls. Academia still thinks adults all learn using their brains. But religion, spirituality and other similar topics fuelled by motivated passion enable us to tap into a deeper level of self and to learn using our whole being rather than simply our cognitive abilities. Let me ask you, when you’ve sat quietly and meditated or connected with the Divine and received a message or gift of understanding, does that come from your head or your soul? Do you “think” it or just “know” it? Most Pagans will say something like, “I don’t know how I knew it but I just knew it”. That’s not your brain talking, that’s your connection with the universe and the Divine talking. That’s at a much deeper level than exercising your brain. That’s using your soul! Having spent those years confirming what Pagans already knew, I then presented that to the academic world in the form of a newly developed learning theory called Whole Person within the doctoral thesis. Interestingly academia has tentatively embraced the notion that adults can learn using their inner being and their soul and not just their brains. Slowly around the globe the theorists are picking up on my theory and thrashing it out, testing it through discussion and debate. It’s slow going at the moment. After all, this is academia we’re talking about and although I’m considered an academic, the truth is that us theorists don’t suddenly embrace and build on new theories. Academia has a time honoured history of conservatism and hesitation so confronting theories that fly in the face of long held “norms” don’t suddenly take over and rejuvenate the tertiary sector! However, as the advert on the TV once said, “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen”. What’s really interesting here though is that while Pagans may be considered social outsiders to the mainstream sometimes and thus their opinions and experiences aren’t always taken seriously, in this case we are teaching the old dog some new tricks. The obvious fact to us that people can learn through their instincts and soul is now finally being given some credence in serious academic circles. The experiences of Wiccans as they learn to be Wiccans is actually being understood in the light of what we as Wiccans take for granted but for which academic theorists have previously misunderstood or simply dismissed. So take heart fellow Pagans, we might not all have university degrees or be acclaimed across the globe as geniuses but in fact we are! We are the leaders and the exemplas of how adults learn using their heart and soul. We’re showing the world what we all already know as being true and quite frankly, pretty dam obvious to anyone with the common sense to see it. That when we are connecting with what we believe in, we learn with so much more than our brains.
http://oakandmistletoe.org.au/ Amethyst is first and foremost a practicing Wiccan and second an academic and vocational training specialist. She completed her PhD thesis via Curtin University in 2008 and her Whole Person theory and research experiences amongst the Wiccans and Witches of Perth, Western Australia is due to be published later in the year. Further information can be obtained by emailing amethyst@oakandmistletoe.org.au
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