United States FlagImpact =  Transformative Education | Examples

Meridian University, USA:
Integral Development (PhD) Course

Together with Meridian University, we have designed an Integral Development Course as a transformative module for a professional PhD program. Participants were highly mature agents of transformation who employed the integral development roadmap as a personal, organisational and community-based transformation tool.

This highly interactive course was designed as a long-distance course, using cutting-edge e-platforms to facilitate transformative processes within the participating group and between group and educators.

For this course, designed around the Integral Development process and framework, Trans4m cooperated with Dr. Rama Mani and her Theatre of Transformation approach. Students were thereby encouraged to practically “enact” their own transformative development path and that of their organization or community – to enable faster integration of learnings into the life worlds of participants.

Participants were exposed to key concepts and practices of Integral Development – with a view to actualizing the interconnected potential of self, organisation and society. The course took participants, step by step, through all levels of integral development. An “engagement map” with guiding questions, helped participants to navigate through the course, and the multiple layers of development that are discussed.

The course focused simultaneously on the acquisition of relevant knowledge, deep insights, as well as innovative new practice. Course assignments were designed to enable transfers to the personal development journey each participant is on (and, of course, her particular organisation and society), thereby strengthening the personal capacity to become an “integral” agent of transformation.

Throughout the course, students were exposed to real-life case stories from diverse cultures from around the world, to purposefully draw on cultural and societal particularities. Cases range from private enterprise, to civic society initiatives, to transformative educational institutions, including a cutting-edge leadership laboratory in Brazil.

The course was infused with arts, performance, and poetry, to help create a stimulating and expansive learning and innovation environment within the classroom. The course culminated in the visualisation and co-creation of an “Integral University Perspective”: an educational context that can authentically “care” for the interconnected development of self, organisation and society.