Re-imagining Higher Ed

May 29, 2020

Thank you for coming together for an energizing call with Otto Scharmer, Dacher Keltner and Sanjay Sarma on re-imagining education! More than 800 of you joined the call, and it opened up so many profound questions, like:
Can we lead with curiosity, compassion and courage? Can education become more than just exams? What is a healthy human? How do we equip students with a transformational literacy? Can schooling integrate hands, head and heart? If online learning succeeds when offline classrooms are socially distant, can we flip our current modalities of teaching? How can service and arts support the praxis of wisdom? What core competencies do existing institutions need to shift from ego-system thinking to eco-system designs? As the half-life of degrees falls, how can we balance vertical specialization of skills with a horizontal universality of values? Instead of replacing one app, maybe it's time to build a new operating system? Can we learn to live in the grey zone? Heading into an upcoming 'social recession', how do we respond to 1.6 billion student lives that are now disrupted?

Below are a few ways to follow-up ...
Here is small collage from your thoughtful feedback and highlights:
"Structural institutions dissolving to allow for wisdom based learning is exciting." "Transformational literacy begs the questions of transformational leadership." "If universities are utilitarian, online learning will destroy them." "Loved the subtle analogy of nature playing an experiment on us by forcing us to do without proximity." "The profit motive inevitably overruns any creative venture in education. Higher ed is particularly market driven, and thus ensures that societal gaps are effectively maintained." "Listening is as an under-rated leadership skill. If you change the way you listen, you change the way you look at the world." "Our students yearn for praxis. They are like young race horses at the gate, and we just need to step back and let them race." "A couple cannot move their relationship online. Technology is no substitute for human interaction in learning." "Ed Schein's empathy walk." "Japanese have a concept of Kintsugi, where a cracked bowl is repaired with gold, making it even more valuable. Pandemic is that opportunity for us, collectively."

Despite the challenging constraints of the pandemic, it is reassuring that our spirits still find ways to come together across boundaries, unite around universal values, and keep compounding small ripples of goodwill until they turn into tidal waves.

Thank you, for co-creating such a sacred space, and we very much look forward to continuing the dialogue.




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