The Reflexible Person

Referring to the European and especially the German education system, this article first identifies that both forms of governance in educational systems as well as pedagogical professionalization have fallen behind. We present new proposals for a substantive and evidence-based reinterpretation and reshaping of what education is and can be and how educational systems can be changed. In order to address these shortcomings, we follow suggestions of a systemic-constructivist pedagogy, and highlight concrete strategies and starting points of an awareness-based system change in the field of educational system development are pointed out. This attempt to not only rethink education, but also to shape it, is based on a critical analysis of the often stagnant internal educational reforms, and the concepts and routines that characterize these stagnant reforms. We hypothesize that, in order to break free from this stagnation, a continuous self-transforming subjectivity of the responsible actors is necessary. This explanatory framework is extended in this article to the figure of the ”reflexible person” (Arnold, 2019a), whose main characteristic is reflexibility, in the sense of being reflexive as well as flexible. The reflexible person possesses practiced and strengthened competencies for observation and reflection including of the self, as well as reinterpretation and transformation. These competences are substantiated and specified as prerequisites and effective conditions for an awareness-based system change in educational systems. In addition, possible ways of promoting and developing them are pointed out.

A Learning Journey through a Heart-Centered Book

As faculty for a graduate program in early childhood leadership, we co-designed a course on community-based action research around Patricia Wilson’s book, The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe. In this review we share how it mirrored our own deepening sense of community engagement practices, and how our students engaged with this unique text on their individual and collective learning journeys. We share highlights from the text that reinforced our sense of liberatory pedagogy. Wilson’s personal stories, as well as the stories of community-engaged practitioners across the globe , invite all of us to create our own purpose and intentions for the evolving path of facilitating change within ourselves and with others.

Striving for Justice

Black ministry has historically found itself at the intersection of theology and racial justice. In this dialogue, a group of people, both ordained and lay, discuss their work in the Methodist Church in Great Britain, taking a deep look at self and system through the lens of justice and inclusion. The Methodist Church has a long history of grappling with issues of (racial) justice. In 2019, at a Racial Justice Symposium convened by the Methodist Church, participants engaged in an awareness-based systems change process to take a deep dive into what it means to shape inclusive community. Theory U (Scharmer 2016, 2018; Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013) provided the overarching framework and key principles for this journey of co-inquiry.

Systems Sensing and Systemic Constellation for Organizational Transformation

This paper examines how a systems sensing—or felt-sense—approach and orientation to inquiry and systemic constellation practice might help social change organizations cultivate capacities to better navigate complexity, both in their outer-facing work and internal dynamics as teams and as individuals. We present a pilot study of systemic constellation practice, sharing the experience of participants during and after the practice, as well as our own reflexive process. Currently an undertheorized and underutilized approach within systems thinking work, systems sensing and systemic constellation, can reveal less visible but nevertheless foundational dynamics at play in an organizational body, and can help create more awareness through widening ways of knowing in the organizational playground. We explore how the facilitated collective sense-making process of systemic constellation engages subtle ways of knowing specifically energetic, relational, and embodied knowing, building on what Heron and Reason (2008) have called an “extended epistemology.” As we suggest, these more subtle ways of knowing warrant further study, particularly as they may contribute to action research methods and foster a more participatory culture of transformation at both an organizational and societal level.

Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change

The editorial of this second issue of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change is entitled "Moving from Transactional to Rational," which we read as one of the central themes running through all of the contributions in this issue. In amplifying the voices of the authors, we contend that we have been confined and restrained by western and hegemonic notions of rationalism, reductionism, empiricism, mechanism, dualism, and causality for too long. Speaking from a relational body of knowing the various contributions assembled here represent attempts to reevaluate the ontological and epistemological positions and foundations that make up the fabric of social institutions and systems. They also suggest ways forward that hold the potential to tap into and activate the transformative potential that lies within people and systems.

Awareness Based Systems Change and Racial Justice

In my years working as a racial justice lawyer I came to realize that the law, while an incredibly important part of the work, is too blunt an instrument for the work of opening people’s hearts. What awareness-based systems change, and Theory U in particular, has to offer is a framework and method for doing this subtle work. In this piece I describe the ways in which this approach can serve as a powerful tool in the transformation of systemic and structural violence through its core movement of turning the beam of observation back on self and system with open-mind (curiosity), open-heart (compassion) and open-will (courage). If structural violence is a series of societal agreements to not pay attention to a set of people we deem less human than ourselves, as I believe it is, then what does it mean to cultivate a quality of attention that redresses these agreements? Not averting our eyes from the systemic racism that shapes our collective existence is core, as is witnessing with a tender heart. Then connecting the tender heart to effective action means acting with understanding of the urgent need to see from the whole, which cannot exclude anyone, especially people who have been marginalized. While you do not unmake centuries of injustice and violence by paying attention with an open-mind, heart, and will, you do help the social body in the room become more effective at the thing they are trying to do - beginning to address centuries of injustice and violence. That is the potential of awareness-based systems change.

Embodied Experiential Learning

This paper presents a craft in experiential teaching and an experiment in embodied learning for peacebuilders and change-makers. The theories, practices and experiments are part of the postgraduate course in Peace of Mind. The intention is to invite the reader to see experiential learning and awareness-based practices as a tool that enables a possibility to evolve our humanness. Interdisciplinary abstract methodologies from Indigenous and phenomenological philosophies support the argument that granular and qualitative knowledge emerges through the embodiment of human expression. It addresses the concept of fragmentation of the self, the importance to pause to give voice to knowledge that words cannot convey. Through the arts, the paper shows non-linear forms of communication with visual experiments. The purpose of this collaborative work is in the craft, in the process, and beyond the authorship.

Reversing The “Eclipse of Relationality”

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talked about, living under the shadow of Auschwitz, that humanity lived with the ‘eclipse of God’. I now wonder if we have moved beyond this ‘eclipse of God’ to a time of the ‘eclipse of relationality’. This article argues that the eclipse of relationality is enabled through a predominant worldview in which the world is understood as mechanical and dead – observed and experienced in increasingly abstract form. In this way of being, the world and the ‘other’, cannot be loved. In light of this eclipse, this article offers two pathways back to life, particularly for practitioners concerned with healing culture. The first is ontological – a new way of being that is experienced through a living polarity between the ideas enfolded within Jung’s theory of individuation and Buber’s dialogical theorising. The second is phenomenological – a new kind of social and ecological practice linked to a perceptivity of living process, traced from Carl Jung and James Hillman, to Mary Watkins, Henri Bortoft and Allan Kaplan. The key wisdom from this article, from travelling down these two pathways - the key theorising of a way forward for cultural healers - is that people increasingly spend so much of their life separated, a-part, lacking intimacy with another, or with the world, or the manifestations of the world that are all around them, and within them. Something is then missing – call it connection, which ensouls the world – the aliveness that invites an anticipatory and participatory relationship with the world, and importantly, a world experienced as both profound Otherness, as well as deeply Oneness. The consequences for people and the world are profound – for the experience of alienation enables abstractions to flourish, exclusions to expand, and rushed interventions to proliferate – the ‘eclipse of relationality’ beckons.

Realizing Collective Capacities to Navigate Complexity

In describing one experimental approach to building organisational capacity for navigating complexities, an evocative testimony about the shift to discovering a collective capability is embedded in a report on a sensitive research inquiry – into how sensing and perceptionsshape unfolding patterns of behaviour and prescribe or circumscribe action potential. The commentary discusses sensing as a tool and the potential role of action research as scientific inquiry into sensing.

The New Paradigm Is Already Here

This paper explores how abstract concepts of alignment, such as moving between different levels of attention, were made visible and concrete in a case study carried out in the context of nature tourism. The alignment practices were mapped from a design research project, where the aim was to construct and explore a prototype of future culture based on care and awareness-based co-creation. The paper combines literature form care ethics and ontology of becoming to support the alignment concepts form awareness-based systems change approach, Theory U. In addition, the collaborative and dialogical tradition of constructive design research is being introduced as a potential sense-making approach to explore the deeper meanings of experiences and events in the development process together with local stakeholders. Later, the research findings are discussed in the light of the individual and collective capacity building needs, which aim to change our inner mindset and posture of being and becoming with the world. Finally, the paper argues that the potential for change and the choice to bring about that change can be found within us as a willingness and readiness to re-invent ourselves in every moment, every encounter, and interaction.