Constructing My World

(Haley Center, Complements of Auburn University Website)

During Winter quarter of 1974 in Auburn’s huge lecture hall, Haley Center room 2370, Dr. Gordon Bond, my youngish world history professor, wove together bits of the familiar – biology, literature, art, and government –as he lectured. I don’t remember what he was teaching, maybe the Renaissance, but the moment is important to me, because it was the first instance during my education when facts seemed to snap from artificial compartmentalization to synchrony. Ah! What I had glimpsed in high school had been staccato bullet points on teachers’ syllabi, yes, but, though disassembled and disparate, when reassembled, embellished, and elaborated upon, these same bullets began to describe and explain the world to me…all from differing vantage points. The literature that I read reflected the culture and the history we learned, but through a different lens. Scientific principles learned in biology labs were matched to the names of pioneers living in and influenced by distinct time periods. It was as if President Philpot had conspired with his faculty, uniting them in a plot to compel me to a more reflective, curious, and open stance as a student.



Dr. Bond had shown me an expansive picture of the world and its interrelatedness. Though the facts were not startling themselves, I remember the excitement that I felt as I mentally gathered, untangled and rewove the old and new threads. By combining disjointed information with a new perspective, he had helped me create a richer world view than if I had only attended to the new information.

I began to see that there were other valid cultures, religions, and political views than those of my conservative community. There were systems at work in the world, with patterns that were predictable, and they did not operate in a vacuum. Exciting ideas, if learned a little bit late. I’d like to say that I woke from my semi-conscious, passive attitude toward learning that day, but that is not what happened. It did not take long, though: one year later I found and fell in love with speech pathology. But it was this split second aha moment of self-awareness, wonder, and, yes, even constructivist learning that began that journey for me.