In a personal statement of belief similar to Edward R. Murrow's 1950s radio broadcasts, This I Believe, Jackson Rainer, Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Psychology and Counseling, explores authentic education as offered by Gardner-Webb University in his essay, On Scholarship, Writing, and Teaching. This education should be one that inspires identity through continued, well-rounded development, voices instruction and challenge, and inspires wisdom not only in a career of choice, but in life as well.
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
-Albert Einstein
Einstein was right. Much of what we do in graduate school is investigate, explore, and think over questions in uncharted territory. I define myself as a scholar, a writer, and a teacher. One of my favorite philosophers is a twentieth century scholar named Clark Moustakas. An existentialist, he said that I should “…be involved in ideas, demonstrations, and experiences that will release and lift out the potential for learning, discovering, and knowing” as a means of facilitating change enrichment between learner and teacher. The processes of scholarship, writing, and teaching provide a rhythmic structure for introspection, investigation, integration, and transformation. The degree to which they are received by others is dependent on my capacity to engage them in a relationship and encounter though the documentation of my ideas and thoughts.
I write, teach, and profess on a variety of psychological processes, health, and well-being. I practice what I preach. As Dean of the Graduate School, I believe that graduate education is a means through which an individual pursues real questions aimed at discovering, deepening, and extending knowledge. Authentic education invites connections to what it learned and requires commitment and involvement between teacher and learner. I hope that students graduating from Gardner-Webb will be lifelong learners who will be awakened, challenged, disturbed, and intrigued by their chosen field of scholarship. I trust that students will use their graduate degree as a way to pursue what they care for as a structure of reflection and dialogue that moves each toward awareness and understanding of a deeper frame of reference, ultimately adding to the greater good. A graduate degree from Gardner-Webb should strengthen career mobility and effectiveness, and must provide relevant tools to bring to bear in professional distinction.
Students come to graduate school to deepen their cosmology. I believe that the pursuit of an advanced degree involves academic, environmental, and spiritual development. I believe spirituality is grounded in what is fundamentally unexplainable by cognition and culture, including such phenomena as the mystery and purpose of life, the meaning of death, and the ultimate balance of the universe which dictates the proportions of plausibly unexplainable fortune and setbacks in life. If graduate education is effective, there should be more questions, more dilemmas, and fewer certainties at the end of the course of study than in the beginning.
Christian theology provides scaffolding for the essence of the mysteries of life, and as such, is a source of confusion, consternation, conflict, satisfaction, sanctity, and wonder. Graduate education has as one of its goals to help the individual achieve, deepen, and maintain a functional and coherent identity as a scholar/practitioner. The ability to integrate science with art, through the Christian spirit, is a lofty goal since it requires multiple complex and sometimes contradictory processes. In a world now filled with challenging choices and few corresponding certainties, recognizing, teaching, and practicing from the integrative nature of Christianity is optimally helpful to students as they seek to increase awareness and scope of their emotional and cognitive landscapes. The Christian spirit allow breathing room for the student to find curiosity in mystery, contain chaos, deepen empathy, amplify those issues that are figural and personally important, and rely on a rubric for what Socrates called “the examined life.”
