About

"It's not new procedures we need: it's new shapes, new Gestalten - new wholes. ...We need to bring ourselves to see a new Gestalt, one in which what seem like fragments of knowledge form part of a coherent whole." - Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

The year 2024 marks the launch of a project I'm calling "New Gestalten". ...Other names were considered, such as "Project EWW" (Exemplars of the Working World) or "Project EWIE" (Exemplars in Work Including Education). With some regret these were ultimately rejected... The hope is that, with a little volunteer support this might become a more active website. And maybe blossom into something more.

What is New Gestalten? 

New Gestalten is an initiative designed to reintegrate the traditional educational process with a more holistic view upon life. Whether you are a student or laborer, or young or old, users of this wiki style website will be able to use the information presented here to gain a broader perspective on any subject (whether for work, study, or leisure). This is due to the unique presentation format, which combines two very different approaches.

A traditional outline, presenting work or fields of study in a subdivided list, is paired with exemplars of those occupations and disciplines, the people who have been significantly engaged with these bodies of work or knowledge and understand the larger phenomena to which they are addressed. This provides the benefit of a "dual description" that integrates both theory and experience.

The intention is to present this information in an easily digestible and condensed format. It is the first step (or one of the first steps) for a much longer journey of discovery. Once interest is sparked, readers are strongly encouraged to pursue a deeper understanding through other resources.

Locally available occupational or educational institutions may not offer a comprehensive selection of fields to explore. But they often do provide a valuable entry point from which to begin the journey to competency within any given field. However the approach used here, to quote Stephen Covey, is to "begin with the end in mind", to see the bigger picture, and to embrace the possibility of failure as a chance to learn and grow. So when a new problem is encountered we know how to access the relevant skill needed to address rather than retreat from it, allowing an approach rather than avoidance mindset. 

We begin with experience: What does the good life look like to you? This can be hard to put into words. Sometimes it's just an intuitive feeling. Move to theory: Take a look at the wiki outline. Does anything grab your attention? Back to experience: Look at the linked exemplars. Do any of their experiences resonate with you? And back to theory: Find the corresponding major course of study or training program offered locally. And once again experience: reintegrate what you are now learning with that first intuitive feeling for the whole.

And one unanticipated, but highly propitious, consequence of this focus on exemplars and their Gestalt is that we can now "close the loop" in education. Not only are we learning about the educational journey of exemplars, but we are also able to ask them if they would've done anything differently were they to embark on this journey today, with the benefit of hindsight and years of experience. This is an invaluable source of feedback for students who have neither. 

Where does the information come from? 

There are several sources, though each has its limitations. For statistical comprehensiveness, the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), a taxonomy of academic disciplines at institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada is hard to beat, and the CIP SOC Crosswalk is an attempt to link educational and occupational fields together:

"The CIP SOC Crosswalk is a joint effort by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics and matches 6-digit CIP Codes from the 2020 Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) with 6-digit detailed descriptions from the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). The purpose of the crosswalk is to match postsecondary programs of study that provide graduates with specific skills and knowledge to occupations requiring those skills or knowledge to be successful. The matches are based on the content of the CIP Code and SOC Code descriptions combined with expertise from statisticians at both federal agencies. The CIP SOC Crosswalk is not based on actual empirical data. NCES is currently exploring possible sources of data that could be used to study the accuracy of the matches in the Crosswalk." [Source]

For example, the CIP code 16.0302 is "Japanese Language and Literature" which corresponds to three separate SOC codes for secondary teachers 25-2031, postsecondary teachers 25-1124, and translators 27-3091. The full list of current CIP codes can be browsed online.

One of the limitations of the CIP codes is that the system itself doesn't appear to be particularly responsive to the evolving fields of study and work that it is attempting to represent. However the publicly created "Outline of academic disciplines" and "List of academic fields" (very similar content) do reveal some of the more emergent diversity. Wikipedia's highly integrated presentation of information, linking subjects to their history and exemplars, also makes this website particularly useful. Aside from Wikipedia, additional sources for exemplars can be found by querying large language models (LLMs) and Internet search engines. An honorable mention for the Library of Congress Classification of subject headings is appropriate due to its ubiquity, but this hasn't been used to classify educational programs or occupational categories, and so it won't get much attention here either.

But theory, no matter how comprehensive, is only so useful. It needs to be matched to the locally available degrees and training opportunities, and so the list of UAF degrees and programs is a very important source of information for New Gestalten, although subjects are better formatted in the "catalog contents" of prior year catalogs (as early as 1996 or 2023). All these sources can be combined. The result is that, in addition to the existing CIP SOC Crosswalk, we can have two new crosswalks: a "UAF CIP Crosswalk" and a "CIP Exemplar/ Gestalten Crosswalk", both augmented as needed by the continuously updated Wikipedia outlines and lists. Together these bridge UAF programs and degrees to the wider world of academic disciplines, occupations, and critically, to the New Gestalten of which they form a part.

What are some of the next steps? 

Broadly speaking, to disambiguate "academic discipline" from "academic field", a discipline is one level above field in hierarchical categorization such that a discipline may contain one or more fields within it. Consequently there are more fields listed than disciplines. So we will begin by looking at the wiki list of disciplines. The UA degree list will be merged into this, possibly with the UA location in parenthesis. A merger with the UA course list would be more detailed, but beyond current scope of this project. [Prior to merger the "Humanities" section was already edited. This can be reverted to original if UA degrees do not correspond with edits.] Lastly, exemplars will be added to the whole list. The result will be edited for concision and displayed in several different formats (outline, table, text, etc.) to bring different aspects to our attention. One such feature might be just how impoverished the UA system has become as budget cuts disproportionately eliminated liberal arts programs while retaining primarily STEM disciplines.

This is the Gestaltencyclopedia. It is a more complete list of disciplines than what any single institution might offer, and something to help students find what they are really looking for: a raison d'etre that their course of study helps them to achieve. Future developments will focus on the exemplars, and the aspects of the larger Gestalt that they can bring into view (with reference to McGilchrist's uniquely humanistic conception of this). The "welcome post" will also be updated for a simplified introduction to how to use the website toward the end of Gestalt development. 

With over 300 degrees and programs, the initial work to merge the lists is taking several weeks. Due to duplicate entries I expect about 200 lines of UA degrees will eventually be merged into a condensed wiki list of about 500 disciplines (combined under just a few super headings). These will provide both "what" one might learn (content), and "how" one might see what one might learn (perspective). And how the directions into which the UA system might grow and develop to flesh out it's curricula in those regions most neglected. The perspective of a larger Gestalt is particularly valuable. It suggests to students in what ways they too might expand their understanding, rather than fragment and constrict their views to progressively narrower domains of knowledge. They can now quickly move across scales of perception to both analyze and contextualize as is called for by the situation. And in many different ways, Gestalt perception is called for every day. 

A final note on knowledge organization and representation. There are many ways of representing information for easy search and retrieval. This is not the main focus of New Gestalten. The intricacies of networks, graphs, zettelkasten apps, and structural data will not be delved into for their own sake. But a "map of knowledge" visualized as a network is among the more visually arresting images that can be produced (also called "mind maps" or otherwise). This sort of map of academic disciplines is not the terrain of life, but we do need better maps all the same. And academic institutions like UAF should be using the data visualization tools available to help students navigate their educational journey. We could take the best of these maps, then overlay the degrees and programs available through the UA system. This would allow students to simultaneously see the world of knowledge and occupations and how to access the entire "adjacent possible" through the UA system, fully leveraging their local opportunities to the best effect. 

The data visualization tool we will use is a scale invariant fractal mind map, that allows coarse or fine grained magnification of the fractal structure of knowledge, and incorporates several layers that we can toggle back and forth between: (1) actual phenomena or problem areas addressed (2) academic themes, disciplines, and paradigms, presented as comprehensively as possible, (3) the locally available academic degrees and programs, and (4) exemplary individuals and the unique Gestalten they embody. Such exemplars could be famous or members of one's immediate family. This layered representation provides actual depth to the fractal appearance, and like Max Scheler's hierarchical ontology illustrated in his "pyramid of values", this also shows that we are not dealing with the flat ontology of postmodernism. 

Contemporary educational practice overwhelmingly focuses on a single layer, usually just the degrees, while neglecting to present all the rest. Likewise, contemporary culture inordinately focuses on utility, the bottom of Scheler's pyramid, and ignores the other layers. We neglect "the holy" and, by analogy, we too often do not attend to "the Gestalt". We might also assume that, like other fractal patterns, some portions of the map may appear to repeat at different scales and locations. A further assumption is that there is some isomorphism between the layers, though there is good reason to suppose that this isn't perfect and when moving from one layer to the next a mutation will occur that subtly changes parts of the structure while retaining other aspects intact. All four layers can also be visualized as a network, since for example,  exemplars relate to both phenomena, disciplines, and degrees (I may add a graphic to the welcome page to illustrate this). 

For example, the 2023 archive catalog lists "colleges and schools", "departments" (not always), and "programs", which can serve as the hierarchical categories of a mind map under which degrees, certificates, and occupational endorsements would be placed. And "research institutes" could correspond with "layer one", or the phenomena being addressed if they were comprehensive enough (they are not). Most new students focus inordinately upon the lowest, most fragmented level of "degrees" without recognizing the gestalt, and thus the significance, of those higher levels (let alone the other layers proposed here). 

The importance of value, meaning, and purpose.

We might say that there are two kinds of work, what we have to do and what we want to do. Ikigai has variously been understood as a quest to find where these types of work coincide. But this is not always possible. The former sort of work is about extrinsic utility, and it is usually engaged in its own elimination. The latter is intrinsically sacred work, and it is engaged in its own perpetuation. Similarly, the "phenomena layer" can be framed in either way, as "basic needs" (Corning) - that which addresses problems, risks, and "global issues". Or phenomena can be framed as meaningful pursuits that respond to and enrich the values of truth, beauty, and goodness in the world. If we view work only as the former, we may fail to grasp the larger gestalt within which it is situated. At it's best, work isn't something to do reluctantly, rather it is something that calls us forth. 

The benefit of doing what you feel a calling to do, whether it is the work of a lifetime or a single evening, is that it involves your whole being. You bring the full weight of your personal agency to the work. And as a consequence you seek the independence needed to express that agency and will. You display initiative and take on leadership roles. This is the entrepreneurial spirit. "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" Nietzsche wrote, and in like manner those who are engaged in a job that is meaningful to them will in many instances succeed where those who do it only because it is a "necessary evil" will fail. ...So the next step in this project is to highlight the values aspect of work within the layers, specifically what it is about a disciple that is attractive, that evokes our response, that piques our curiosity, that makes us feel good to engage in and is emotionally rewarding. 

McGilchrist's "ever greater Gestalt" is what enables Karl Friston's "sophisticated inference". It is the patterning of gestalt after gestalt that enables us to plan and execute the shortest path to our ultimate goal. Only when we see the larger whole can we gain depth perception; the maps become transparent to the purpose and animating values behind them, and we now see how the constituent relationships working together to produce deeper meaning. As a result, what may appear to be meaningless drudgery that leads us away from our goals, is many times revealed to actually be the best path for achieving our long term goals, but only if we are able to see this via gestalt perception. There are many paths to the same destination, and so in that sense we are all involved in the same project, the same work, just engaged in different aspects of this single endeavor. Many voices, one song. (Or in John Donne's words, "No man is an island, entire of itself".) And what is the meaning, purpose, and value of all this work, education, and art? Perhaps it is all for the sake of realizing and sharing the greater Gestalt, or to restore one which was earlier shattered (whether ours, or that of another). This is the generative "angle" with which we approach such things, capable of ending the stasis of "writers block" and "analysis paralysis". When energy and health returns, when we intuit a language, when we create an evocative work of art, or learn something about our world, each time we hope to reveal something new, something greater, something that maybe we hadn't known or experienced in exactly this same way. New Gestalten.

[Stay tuned... under construction.]