Continuous Learning: Arta's Wisdom and No Kids for Me

Continuous Learning 

I am constantly taking courses which is often called continuous learning. I have been taking an Adult Education Certificate in e-Learning certificate for two years hoping to professionally transition out of the classroom and into instructional design. As people who have taken adult education classes know, you have to share a post each week to demonstrate you are actually doing the work. In the past few weeks I have used personal story telling to share what I have learned, and thought I would share two posts with my family. The first about Arta and her wisdom, and the second about living a life without having had my own children. Thanks for reading and yes I kept the academic references etc. :) 

Aunt Arta and Her Wisdom

This week I am taking the opportunity to introduce you to one of the most wise people I know, my aunt Arta Johnson. In the early 1990’s I had just moved to Alberta and she had just begun a 16 career with the University of Calgary Libraries, which would become a long series of transformative experiences and would widen her circles (Bassett, 2005; Merriam & Bierema, 2014). Arta offered a welcoming home while I was in town for holidays and we spent many hours together. Her new paid employment helped her begin her feminist awakening which influenced my own feminist worldview. 

 
Arta’s new paid employment offered her the opportunity to take courses that challenged her previous ideas of gender schemas thus widening her circles as she began espousing less traditional sex-at-birth and gender roles (Bassett, 2005; Neff, 2021).  This included the role as president of the family company that owned land and cabins we all shared, a role her father, Doral, had been educating her for, for several years. After Doral passed, Arta spent the first 20 years as president of the company completing the corporate work, often alone, then the next 20 years with increased family participation using holistic and systemic thinking, “taking in the whole of the situation and…distinguish[ing] what it consists of, what the various parts are, and how they relate to each other” (Bassett, 2005, p. 8). She was able to use wisdom as “the capacity to see the big picture and to know what priority or weight to give things” (Bassett, 2005, p. 8) maintaining the integrity of the company and land, despite many obstacles and legal disagreements amongst family members. 

As Dr. Carrie Bassett (2011), a wisdom researcher, has shared, “wisdom is having sufficient awareness in various situations and contexts to act in ways that enhance our common humanity” (para. 6). Arta was able to use discerning wisdom to answer questions like what is really going on and what is important, when family members disagreed (Bassett, 2005, p 7). She was able to respect another point of view and try to see the business through other people’s realities (Bassett, 2005, p 7). She engaged others in making decisions as she wanted the family land to be enjoyed. She transformed our self-knowledge as she taught us to think about our choices and reflect on how they would affect the family collective and land (Bassett, 2005, p 7). Arta had an “expert-level knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life” (Merriam & Bierema, 2014, p. 185) and used her “practical and successful intelligence and creativity” to balance the interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of our lives as part of the family and company (Merriam & Bierema, 2014, p. 185). Through these years of effort, Arta has taught me that continuous learning can add to a person's intelligence and knowledge used for common humanity can help us each become more wise. 

Sadly, we lost the matriarch of our family in the Spring of 2021 but the legacy Arta has left us is immeasurable (in part as the main author of our family blog, Larch Haven: https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/). She is at the top of my list of wise people and I am so grateful for her wise influence in my life. 
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References:
Bassett, C. (2005). Emergent Wisdom: Living a life in widening circles, ReVision, 27(4), p. 6-11. https://www.wisdominst.org/emergent.pdf 

Bassett, C. (2011). Living, Learning, and Leading For a Wiswer Future. The Wisdom Institute and

Becoming OtherWise Programs. https://www.wisdominst.org/wisdom.html 

Merriam, S. B., & Bierema, L. L. (2014). Adult Learning: Linking theory and practice. Jossey-Bass. 
Neff, K. (2021). Fierce Self-Compassion: How women can harness kindness to speak up, claim their power, and thrive. Harpercollins Publishers.

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Transformative Learning: My Life, No Children

I did not know that Peter Jarvis’ theory of transformative learning through experience would help me use hindsight to understand some of my critical life experiences. In particular my experience of being a cis-woman who does not have children. I am sharing my experience today while indicating the associated learning process, identified by the 1-7 boxes from figure 3 from Jarvis’ (2012) paper titled, Learning From Everyday Life.

I was raised within a religious community that emphasized heterosexual marriage and motherhood as the main focus of every woman’s life. Other choices, such as work outside the home, could be made but nothing would compare to the joyful role of motherhood (box 1-1; Jarvis, 2012). Finding myself divorced and without children at the young age of 29, I had several moments of disjuncture, when I could “no longer presume upon our world and act upon it in an almost unthinking manner” (Jarvis, 2012, p.9). My life experiences and social interactions with others caused me to have “larger gaps that demand[ed] considerable learning” about the necessity of having children (box 2; Jarvis, 2012, p. 12). I also had pre-consciously internalized the message of motherhood, equating it to a good life, more deeply than I had thought, and my divorce brought these ideas into my conscious awareness (Jarvis, 2012; Merriam & Bierema, 2014). Due to these experiences I began learning about motherhood and womanhood as part of my everyday life. 

While experiencing the emotions surrounding the ideas and commitments of motherhood (box 4) I decided to take several courses of action (box 5). I completed a great deal of research, including searching out and reading books like Nobody’s Mother: A life without kids by Lynne Van Luven (2006). I loosely planned out my life with several options (including unpartnered, partnered, with children, or without children) and made some commitments to myself. These commitments helped me gather new knowledge about creating a joyful life, thus beginning to resolve the cognitive dissonance I experienced about the messages of motherhood from my youth (box 6). As years passed, I did not find a partner with whom I was willing to take on the commitment of children and I was not willing to have children as a single person. This brings me to my current life stage where I am contentedly child-less and I can review a past, experience a present, and build a future full of joy, which for me did not include having children (box 7 and 1-2). Jarvis' learning theory has helped me understand what I have learned from my experiences as a life long series of learning processes.  

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References:

Jarvis, P. (2012). Learning From Everyday Life. Human & Social Studies, Research and Practice (HSSRP), 1(1), p. 1-20. http://hssrp.uaic.ro/continut/1.pdf 

Merriam, S. B., & Bierema, L. L. (2014). Adult Learning: Linking theory and practice. Jossey-Bass. 

Van Luven, L. (2006). Nobody’s Mother: Life without kids. Touchwood Editions.