Statement of Language Background and Educational Philosophy
My linguistic, cultural, and educational philosophies are founded initially in my having grown up with a mother who believed and taught the diversity of religious views in the world as so many different faces of a larger structure, as parts of a complete whole, each having its place and contributing to that whole.
This thinking led me ultimately to explore general metaphysics, storytelling, Native American Shamanism, Tibetan Buddhism, and a reading knowledge of Wicca, Zoroastrianism, and the Indo-European goddess religions as alternate faces of the greater structure I had come to know through thirty years of Christian reading, learning, and teaching.
It also carried over into my learning of German in high school and in my undergraduate work, where I came one course short of a Bachelor of Arts degree in German, as well as the study of Tibetan (with a smattering of Sanskrit) in my late thirties.
Along the way, I have come to value the diverse cultures, beliefs, and languages of the world and of the American melting pot (discussed at length herein) as immeasurably rich and intrinsically linked and inseparable.
Thus, I come to an understanding of rhetoric and of education as an exploration of possibilities and as a comparison/contrast – primarily comparison – of diverse experiences. It is not my intention in this exploration and comparison to separate the inseparable into distinct, untouching, isolated entities, but to further the blending, with distinction, of which Rodriguez and Anzaldúa write.