Truth, Beauty and Goodness: Three Interconnected Aims and Means of 'True Education'

Glen Cotten’s decades-long study, action-research and practice of “transformative education” has included his studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (where he earned a Master of Education degree in 1994) and at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (where he received a Ph.D. in education in 2007). He was also exposed to the learning of the developers of FUNDAEC while serving in the Office of the International Teaching Centre from 1998 to 2001, and he has over 15 years of experience designing and teaching, while systematically applying principles of transformative education to his practice. He has taught courses in ESL, EAP, Education and Service-Learning in North Carolina community colleges and at universities in Turkey and China (including most recently his work as an EAP and service-learning lecturer at New York University Shanghai for the past four years). His dissertation consisted of a case study of a successful, Bahá’í-inspired community development/diversity workshop at a US high school, and the findings of this study reveal how experiencing “authentic communication and dialogue” across socio-cultural divides had a powerful, morally transformative effect on workshop participants. More deeply, such communication/dialogue stems from and further amplifies the innately human spiritual impulses to seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Glen presented on the latter topic at the 2018 Association for Bahá’í Studies conference in Atlanta and the 2016 meeting of American Educational Research Association, and his related publications so far include articles published in The Journal of Thought and Community Works. As a child and adult, Glen has lived and later worked in diverse parts of the world, including the US, Germany, Thailand, Vietnam, El Salvador, Haiti, Kenya, Israel, Turkey, and China. His endeavors to promote  transformative education are ultimately inspired by the deepest passion of his life, his relationship with Bahá’u’lláh, and the systemic learning he has gained, on his own and in dialogue with friends, regarding the ways in which transformative education can be effectively fostered through devotional meetings, study circles, firesides, gatherings, and retreats, and other forums/spaces for meaningful conversation/dialogue is directly connected to the themes of this webinar.