Learning and the "gradual and intentional formation of self"

Staff Assistant Helen Halliwell in conversation about what our Spring 2025 Theme and BINST Themes broadly have given her and others

Thinking with the Berkeley Institute is the substack newsletter-blog for our community to engage in and extend the conversations we’re having. Below, we’re sharing a conversation with Staff Assistant Helen Halliwell on our 2025 Spring Semester Theme “Varieties of Thinking,” as well as what BINST themes have taught her over the past two years. At the end of the conversation, be sure to check out a video in which Helen, BINST alumna Angelina, and PhD student Jared discuss the “varieties of thinking” we engaged this semester through our reader of short stories.

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— The Berkeley Institute Editors

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A Conversation with Helen Halliwell,
Staff Assistant of the Berkeley Institute

What about this semester’s theme resonated with your experience as an undergrad, and soon-to-be-graduate student?

One of the strongest ways this theme resonated with my identity as a student – as an undergrad and as a prospective grad student – was how it foregrounded the idea of thinking as an act. As I anticipate starting a seven or eight year graduate study period, I keep asking myself some version of “what am I doing?” Previous Berkeley Institute themes have centralized the “why” of thinking and considered how forms of thinking and reading can habituate us in beneficial ways – like the “Virtue and the Intellectual Life” semester. This semester’s theme has complemented that discussion really well as it distinguished the different forms of thinking that we all engage in. If the “work” of the university is thinking, it can be hard to understand what it is that we really “do.” This semester’s theme helped begin to illuminate that for me.

What surprised you about this theme as it unfolded across the semester? What did you realize you hadn't considered, or hadn't recognized before?

I was most surprised by the idea that other kinds of thinking can play a role within critical thinking, including imaginative thinking and contemplative thinking. University trains us in the former, while the latter two are varieties of thinking that I hold very dear. I have worried in the past that there’ll be no time for contemplation or no place for imagination in my professional world, that academic work must only be analytical. How relieving to learn that, in fact, imagination and contemplation are an essential part of critical thinking!

With regards to imaginative thinking, I was reminded this semester that in academic work, just as in creative or artistic work, we need to imagine a place for that piece of work or thought, perhaps even before its conception. A continuous play of imaginative thinking is crucial to even begin to conceive the form or direction of a work. As for contemplative thinking, we discovered elements of it during our “Critical Thinking” discussion with Lydia Davis’ short story “Foucault and Pencil.” The story is written, as pointed out by our friend Jared, in a very paratactic style – it lists the narrator’s actions but has no subordinating clauses, gives no reason or priority or because-ness to their actions. In academic work, there has to be an element of faith that the work is important, as well as a simultaneous withholding of the answer to what the work “means,” what exactly its significance is or impact might be. The first step of critical thinking is contemplative thinking – which is perhaps a more romantic way of saying “apprehending the facts.”

As you prepare for graduate school, what specific variety of thinking do you hope to teach to your own future students?

I’m excited to share practices of contemplative thinking and its possibilities in academic work. In a world where there is no time to make time, there is something valuable, perhaps, in thinking with prolonged hesitation or intentional resistance to closure.

With the proliferation of AI-generated content in our media and learning spaces, we now find ourselves caught between unthinking acceptance and second-guessing the veracity of what we encounter (perhaps even second-guessing our ability to “read” or “see” well.) Contemplative thinking requires the development of receptive practices and habits over a period of time, and I think this sustained and repetitive consideration is going to become an all-the-more crucial variety of thinking as our society develops in the direction it’s going. Maybe what I’m saying is that this forced second-guessing of truth in media can lead us to increasingly contemplative practices. In our Community Reading Group, we discussed how contemplative thinking often involves an object of contemplation, and also often entails a feedback loop of apprehending both the object and the self perceiving the object. I definitely want to share this contemplative undercurrent with students studying texts and other media, as I think it will be an increasingly valuable point of reflection and practice in the years to come.

How have other BINST themes been helpful to you on your intellectual journey?

The community read for the Fall 2024 Semester, themed “Religious Life and the University,” was J.D Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. That text contextualized the questions of “Religious Life and the University” and opened up this theme to me in a really generative way. One of the questions of the semester was about how the religious life and the intellectual life can enrich each other. We discussed Franny’s spiritual experience with a text assigned to her in college, and asked why people have conversion experiences in college – either religious or non-religious – and what that has to do with the act of reading a text. That semester, the theme and community read picked up two things that I have sometimes struggled to reconcile – the university and spiritual life – and looked at them in multiple possible integrations. With these topics in particular, I have in the past inhabited an all-or-nothing mentality, and I think I assumed that that absoluteness was what it meant to be an integrated self – being totally true to one thing at the exclusion of another. But there are many kinds of integrations, and we read by many lights. I can allow myself to be shaped by a teaching – from university study or from spiritual life – try it on, and integrate it into myself, gently. Franny and Zooey really helped me formulate my own questions about what it means to live with integrity. The text also illuminated how knowledge can come quickly, while wisdom arrives more slowly.

What principles have BINST themes made conspicuous to you that you are excited to pass on to students?

The Berkeley Institute was the first place I encountered where people asked questions explicitly about living well and doing good work – or at least, where I first noticed these questions being asked. This of course came up in the Fall 2023 theme “The Good Life,” but also in Spring 2024 with “Virtue and the Intellectual Life,” where we asked, “How do we become the kind of person who does the stuff we want to do well?” Discussing these questions over the past two years at Berkeley Institute has made me especially alert and receptive to them outside of BINST. I am eternally grateful for that and can’t wait to make these concerns conspicuous to students, to show them that these are questions you can ask about your education and during your educational journey, that learning isn’t just about accumulating knowledge, but is directly involved with one’s sensitive, gradual, and intentional formation of self. The fact that these questions can be and are asked in academic settings is even more exciting.