Learning that Transforms Hearts and Minds


Rethinking How We See Our World Changes Everything


by Linda Sechrist


I


n the 30 years since Harrison Owen introduced Open Space Technology (OST), it has been used hundreds of thousands of times by three-quarters of the world’s countries. Whether a few people gather in a circle to share ideas and brain- storm personal issues or thousands dis- cuss a bulletin board of topics around tables, OST is a safe, informal venue for transformative learning. Guided by purpose-based, shared leadership, it allows individuals fo- cused on a specific task to freely speak their thoughts and be heard. It also encourages breakout groups to mine for more information—learning individual- ly, as well as collectively, and self-orga- nizing in order to concentrate on more complex topics. “Boeing engineers used OST to learn how to redesign air- plane doors and young Egyptians used it to strategize for their Arab Spring,” as examples, comments Owen.


Circle Principle For Owen, like Jack Mezirow, author of the paper, “Core Principles of Transfor- mative Learning Theory,” 20th-century Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and


16 NA Twin Cities Edition


Juanita Brown, co-founder of The


World Café, learning is


transformation, the keystone of life, and the essence of meaningful education. “The circle principle contains the pre- dictability of fresh, emerging thoughts and learning that never occurred previ- ously,” explains Owen.


He points to an experiment regard-


ing children’s capacity for self-learning initiated by Sugata Mitra, Ph.D., the former science director of an educa- tional technology firm in India. On the outside wall of the building where he worked, Mitra installed a computer facing a New Delhi slum where most children were unschooled and illiter- ate and had never seen a computer. He turned it on and told children they could play with it. Via a noninvasive video camera,


he watched 7-to-13-year-olds discover how to use the computer and teach each other how to play music and games and draw using Microsoft’s Paint program. Repetition of the ex- periment in other impoverished sec- tions of India yielded similar results. Wherever he established an Internet connection, children that could not


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read English, the Internet’s default language, taught themselves how to use the Web to obtain information through their interactions with each other and the computer. “I agree with what Mitra surmised from his experiment—learning is emer- gent, which is another word for self-or- ganizing,” remarks Owen. Like Freire, Owen likens traditional education to the “banking” method of learning, whereby the teacher passes information to students that become dependent on someone else rather than learning how to think on their own. Suzanne Daigle, a Sarasota, Flor- ida-based consultant with a Canadian multidisciplinary consulting firm, ex- plains how the OST learning environ- ment changed her life: “My personal transformation began in 2009, when I volunteered to assist another OST facil- itator. I was a perfectionist who judged myself harshly and struggled with the question, ‘Who am I to think I can help hold space for leaders to transform themselves through their learning when I have so little experience?’” She notes, “Before such experienc-


es, even though I was a leader in my corporate career, I doubted myself and often believed that what others had to say was more significant and interesting than what I could express.” Now she says she has shed her people-pleas- ing tendencies and former attempts to control other people’s agendas and discovered the freedom and courage of her own voice. “As an OST facilitator, my life work now occurs in the mo- ments I am collaboratively learning and listening for opportunities to enter into meaningful conversations that can lead to actions,” says Daigle. “I invite others to do the same.”


Co-Learning In a compulsory two-year Theory of Learning class for an International Bac- calaureate degree at California’s Grana- das Hill Charter High School, math and science educator Anais Arteaga helps students apply two major elements of transformative learning: self-reflection to critique one’s own assumptions and discourse through which they question or validate their judgments. She focuses on the roles that perception, language,


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