16 Bachelor Students from Switzerland’s University of St. Gallen made the journey to TRANS4M’s Home for Humanity in the French Jura Mountains for a three-day intensive learning experience. They were welcomed by course director Alexander Schieffer, as well as Pius Leutenegger and Titus Palivan, both members of TRANS4M’s Transformative Impact Team.
The highly interactive course is particularly geared for motivated students who are keen to make a meaningful contribution to the world at atime of global change. Designed as an integral ʺdevelopment journeyʺ, participants “travel” through the interconnected levels of self‑development necessary to become effective agents of change in today’s volatile and challenging world.
Working individually and in small groups, participants combine theory and action, and learn‑by‑being‑and‑doing. The course focuses simultaneously on the acquisition of relevant knowledge, as well as practical, personal and interpersonal developmental skills. It also awakens individual and collective creativity, heightens cultural sensitivity, and strengthens the capacity of self‑expression.
The international student group – including two participants from far off Japan – gelled immediately, and already the opening outdoor exercises helped to lay the foundation for deep inner learning on a personal level and engaged, open co-learning on an interpersonal level. The combination of: exposure to relevant knowledge; skill development exercises; artistic assimilation processes (through drawing, painting, poetry, music and dance); physical movements in and purposeful connection to nature; individual and group presentations – altogether framed within an “Integral Transformation Agent Process” and enriched by deep individual and collective inquiry – turned out to be the right mix for the group to feel integrally enriched and expanded at the end of the three days. In particular the final presentations, in which participants assimilate the Theatre of Transformation methodology, step on stage, project themselves into the future and theatrically enact themselves as accomplished Agents of Transformation, was not only a moving individual and group exercise but a worthy culmination of inspiring and transformative three days.
For TRANS4M – and particular also through the engaged, innovative and co-creative support of Pius Leutenegger and Titus Palivan – this course was clearly an evolution of its own innovative and integral educational repertoire. The touching, positive and critically constructive feedback given by participants at the end of the intensive affirmed not only the existing learning format, but also allowed for meaningful evolution of the course in the future.
In conclusion, a final word from Titus Palivan: “Joined the class four years ago to learn, joined this class again to give back. In the end, learned much more than four years ago. With each act of giving, comes learning and new experiences.“
