A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: January 27, 2000
Faculty on the Site.
This page is meant to serve as a forum for our academic discourse on the extent to which we conceive of helping as a value and as a social responsibility. Many students start out their career plans from the notion that they want to help people. As a bank director once told our career seminar, "Well, that's fine, but HOW do you plan to help them? The bank cannot condone that you simply give its money to those that need it. In what ways could a job with our bank enable you to help people?" An excellent question!
Employers and teachers often grow exasperated with the vagueness of students' wish to help others. We all, teachers, employers, students, want to know helping that translates to what is at hand. Helping can't mean giving the bank's money away, giving A's to anyone who wants them, giving diplomas and degrees with no attention to competence. So what does helping mean?
All of us, as socializing agents, have an opportunity and a responsibility to help others through our teaching and learning. This section will develop links to articles and sites that will strengthen your skills in helping, whether they be used in strengthening social bonds with family and friends, in teaching and providing safety nets for others in your social groups, or in the simple joys of everyday living.
The importance of this aspect of helping is discussed in Socrates to Psychoanalysis to Teaching. More links will be added soon. . .
Helping Through Academic Advising
- The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal
Pat Acone brought this URL back from Nacada meetings on Academic Advising. Here's another way to "help people," folks. Link added March 22, 1999. Link checked January 2000.- CSUDH Advising Page
Helping Through Academic Discourse
To the extent that teaching is guided learning it is helping. Jonathan Lear, in "Eros and Unknowing: The Psychoanalytic Significance of Plato's Symposium, Chapter 7 of The Open Minded, The Harvard University Press, 1998, traces this line of reasoning in his comparison of Socratic teaching to psychoanalysis. In Socrates to Psychoanalysis to Teaching we follow that line of reasoning through to teaching.
Academic discourse is the highest form of teaching, for in discourse we exchange ideas, fitting them into a context of rational argument and non-rational creative interplay of our wishes and phantasies that sparks the creative production of new knowledge. In academic discourse there ceases to be a teacher and a learner (though this was the Socratic model of the teacher as near-divine and as "knowing"). Creativity requires this leveling of the playing field, for creativity does not come from "knowing." Creativity comes from play, and from the free operation of the rational, the wish, and the phantasy. (For now, we ask that you take this on faith, as our phantasy. To insert academic sources will take time, and we wanted to get this material to you as quickly as possible. Documentation later . . .)