Pedagogy of Presence: An interview with Professor Hirsh Diamant
Lunar New Year festivities at Evergreen are an annual February tradition, which include interactive events featuring topics ranging from Qigong, Taiji, philosophy, and mind-body medicine, to cooking, calligraphy, and art. Evergreen faculty such as Hirsh Diamant, Lin Crowley and Mukti Khanna, organize this Lunar New Year celebration to facilitate crosscultural experiential learning events for the community. These experiential learning opportunities are seen as a celebration of cultures, art, health, resilience, and renewal.
Celebrating Lunar New Year with the Evergreen faculty and learning community is something that I look forward to each year, so much so that it seems it has become a part of my own winter traditions. Taiji with Master Chungliang Al Huang and Taoist New Year messages from Master Liu He now seems like a part of Winter Quarter’s rhythm.
Reflecting upon the time and dedication these faculty members have invested in planning these events each year, (for over twenty years now!), I was curious why the philosophy of experiential learning is important to them and how it fits into their teaching philosophy.
I had the honor of sitting down for a chat with one of our seasoned faculty members, Professor Hirsh Diamant. I hope you enjoy reading this interview, as Professor Hirsh shares his perspective on experiential and cross-cultural learning at Evergreen.
Active Inquiry and the “Pedagogy of Presence”
Jess: The Lunar New Year Celebration events held annually at Evergreen have been such a meaningful part of my learning experience, I was excited for the opportunity to speak about the purpose behind these events that you, along with Mukti Khanna and Lin Crowley have been organizing for over twenty years now. I had hoped you would share with us the reasons why you feel the Lunar New Year events benefit the students and the larger learning community here, and how this relates to our philosophy of experiential learning at Evergreen.
Hirsh: I think understanding culture is so important, especially in our world today, that the world is multicultural. And you know, this idea of experiential learning is that learning is an active inquiry. It’s not something you collect as a souvenir from the classroom, but it’s something that happens to you when you’re involved in something, and this involvement allows you to transform. It’s an active inquiry, not in reading a text, but in being involved with other people. The event itself is the text, and the exam is how successful the gathering is, in this community where we practice health and harmony by breathing together, by moving together, by making something together.
It allows us to break the barriers because here we have faculty and students and community coming together and practicing, playing together, and being creative together.
It’s great that we’re talking about resilience. And so, resilience, the celebration, is the resistance against the stress, against the stress of the Academy, academic learning, the stress of life, the stress of what’s happening in the world. So, it’s a great tool for practicing resilience.
I was thinking about the word for experiential learning because I practice experiential learning in all my classes, and I thought maybe we can call it a “Pedagogy of Presence,” because it’s a presence of breath. It’s a presence of movement. It’s the presence of engagement.
Co-Collaboration with Faculty and Experiential Learning
Hirsh: When you learn about culture, it is not by reading a book, not by watching a video, not by observing some kind of exotic tradition, but by being a steward, by being a steward of cultural traditions.
For me, it’s an opportunity to work with the other faculty, Mukti Khanna and Lynn Crowley, in creating this event, because although this event happens every year, every year it is different. We invite different practitioners, different teachers, and different mentors. And it’s a great opportunity for us to work together, and to cross divisional boundaries. And we always invite other faculty to join us. Let’s plan it together! There is no script. We’re creating the script together. It manifests differently for different faculty. Such as with Mukti, she’s a psychologist; her focus is more on health and psychology. With Lin, it’s language and culture.
In the winter, I’m teaching “Arts and the Child,” so my students are meeting (virtually) with elementary students in China. My students meet with Chinese teachers and Chinese elementary students (ages 8 through 12). My students are teaching them traditional English nursery rhymes related to horses. And they’re teaching my students Chinese nursery rhyme about horses. [This is the 2026 animal of the Lunar Calendar, the Fire Horse.]
The Lunar New Year is also called Spring Festival. It’s the beginning of spring. It’s a kind of cosmic renewal where we’re resetting the clock. My students will be also working in schools here in the United States. My students are not only from Washington state because I teach on Zoom, (some students are from down South, some students are on the East Coast), but they’ll be also working in schools, bringing some of the things that they’re learning from Chinese students. They’re bringing it, as a practice, to students in the schools that they’ll be working with. So, it works. I’m happy it works and it inspires me.
Jess: I got to participate in this type of experiential learning during “Arts and the Child”, also. I vividly remember learning nursery rhymes with the Chinese kindergarten students; and I can still remember the nursery rhyme about the dragon that we learned that year. I think it does make learning come alive. I feel like experiential learning is such a unique part of the Evergreen experience and something that you integrate into all your courses.
With that in mind, do you have any advice for other faculty who might want to do what you’re doing, but they’re not sure where to start with adding some of these aspects of experiential learning?
Hirsh: I think working with other faculty, the fact that Evergreen team teaching (provides opportunity for) 3 faculty joining together; I think it’s such a great, great strength of Evergreen pedagogy and Evergreen curriculum. So, I’m always up for collaborations, you know?
I’m always interested in learning new things and connecting with new faculty members. So that’s one good way. The other way is following what your interest is, culturally. We learn from Native American elders. We learn from Chinese culture, from Indian culture, from Vietnamese culture, from Ukrainian culture, from cultures of the Middle East. We’ll learn about other cultures to help us come back to better understand our own culture.
Jess: I have the opportunity to meet with the new faculty here at Evergreen, in my role. So, I feel that introducing them to some of the seasoned faculty that we have here, and people who have these roots within the Evergreen community is something that would be beneficial to them to know about, and how they can make connections here. I see participating in these annual traditions as one of the ways to do that. For me, it’s that seasonal pattern and repeating these things and these cycles. It sort of becomes a part of your life experience, and learning experience, as you integrate it into your life.
Hirsh: I think a big part of our experience in education (and especially now that we are integrating Zoom so much, and AI) is our disconnection; our disconnection from nature and our disconnection from each other.
And maybe part of our task as educators is to find ways for us to reconnect with nature, because nature is really our first teacher, (our maybe most important teacher). And so, the ancient traditions, the indigenous traditions, teach us that we need to live with the season, that we need to be in tune, in harmony with the season; that what we do in winter is different than what we do in spring, is different than what we do in summer. So the more we are rooted in that, the more we are rooted in being connected when our curriculum is what’s happening outside of our window, both in nature and in politics and in social life. This is our curriculum, right?
And coming back to the Lunar New Year, what I wanted to mention is, well, for one thing, it’s always creative, right? Because it’s always new; it’s a new beginning. The year turns, right? The cosmos turns around to a new page. The Chinese Zodiac is the Zodiac of animals, and each animal, they were chosen for a reason. They’re not haphazard. It’s not random, because each animal brings us a teaching, right? Brings us a gift that we can learn from.
Final Reflections
Professor Hirsh offers us these ideas for contemplation, such as the symbolism of the Fire Horse, and the ways in which ancient wisdom can be applied to our current existence. We might ask ourselves what lessons we can learn from the powerful element of fire this year, and how we can integrate resilience and renewal into our lives during this season. There is also much to contemplate, if we choose to reflect upon this “pedagogy of presence,” and what it means to be present, and mindful, in our current experience. This reminds me of the questions being raised in the course I am currently taking with Jamyang Tsultrim, (EastWest Psychology): What does it look like for us to be present, even as we notice ourselves having experiences such as anger towards injustice, grief, illness, loss or other types of suffering? What about the pleasant experiences we find comfort in, as well? Can we simply notice our experiences with mindful awareness, and practice responding to ourselves in a way that is gentle and without judgment? Perhaps this will have a ripple effect, expanding outwards. Let me know if you try this and what your experience is like over the next couple of months. I’d like to hear from you. – Jess
