May 31, 2021
Embodiment, Climate Change and Transformative Learning
Introduction
Joining the 2020 Ulab2x programme a committed group of educational changemakers embarked on a five month learning journey. We explored together how to develop Vertical Literacy, in Wageningen University and Research (WUR) based in the Netherlands. WUR is one of the top ranked higher education institutions in the country and was formerly the farming research institute, of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. Wageningen University trains experts in life and social sciences and focuses its investigations on scientific, social and commercial problems in the fields of life science and natural resources.
Our educational experiment at WUR was hosted by the Centre for Place Space and Society, a joint initiative formed between three social science departments of the university. Two key prototypes emerged out of the Ulab2x programme, one the relatively recently launched, WUR Transformative Learning Hub offering monthly, virtual experiential transformative learning and research sessions. The other prototype was my Social Presencing Theatre (SPT) derivative, a Mindful and Embodied Relationship to Climate Change. As of May 2021 the WUR learning hub had already run numerous successful learning events around, broad themes such as anti-racism, sustainability, climate change, care, curiosity as well as conducting virtual field research at a distance.
Reflecting deeply upon the emotional distance, I personally experienced around the climate change conundrum in the summer of 2020. I wrote the following blog on ‘The Case for Mindful Embodied Relationship to Climate Change’ . Partly because of the Vertical Literacy project we carried out at WUR last spring and summer, I decided to develop my SPT inspired, climate focused protoype. With the hope that I and perhaps others, might be able to develop, a grounded and ultimately saner relationship to this challenge of our age.The prototype was successfully run twice in midsummer 2020 once off and then online the design of which was co-created together with Marielle Slierendricht an SPT facilitator and founder of the Amsterdam SPT practice hub.
This article, is a summary of the half-a-prototype session, I delivered in the WUR Learning Hub in November 2020, which was focussed on broader themes around Climate Change. On the day I introduced around fifteen educational changemakers from diverse universities and specialisms, to my prototype. The session was designed to offer a taster, of what might be possible to experience in educational settings. Emphasising the wisdom of the body as a navigational aid, to explore the myriad of emotional and psychological challenges, posed by climate change, which in my view is undoubtedly experienced intensely by both students and teachers yet monolothically ignored in education systems.
What happened during the session
I led the group in the second half of the session into phases of experimentation, play and risk, by exploring both dimensions of a mindful and embodied relationship to climate change. Initially I guided the group through an integrative mindfulness practice, helping alter the shared state of group awareness, bringing everyone more consciously into the present moment, whilst forming a virtual space, to engage in a collectively generated sense of presence.
Next drawing on Social Presencing Theatre’s 20 minute dance I helped participants attune to the wisdom of their bodies through slowing down and letting go, to some degree, the habitual, automatic, controlling instructions and preoccupations, normally dominant in everyone’s minds. With Zoom cameras off, the group practiced individually sensing and following the signals of the body, whilst allowing it to move freely in the privacy of each person’s home. Thereby minimising anyone’s opportunity to experience acute self consciousness, while avoiding the possibly uncomfortable gaze of others.
Having helped the group ease their automatic patterns of stress and tension, I then encouraged participants to more fully sense and experience, the totality of their relationship to climate change, through forming a physical sculpture. In Social Presencing Theatre this is known as a ‘stuck’, usually a complex problem or challenge that is holding the person back. The ‘stuck’ is normally enacted and embodied, in relationship to a personal or professional challenge, almost never oriented towards massive collective phenomena such as climate change.
In this case, the intention in forming a physical sculpture of the stuck, was for each participant to holistically sense the tension, angst and mental anguish of climate change, making itself known in that moment, through immediacy of the lived experience of each person’s body. The stuck process is designed for the body to lead the way, into making the shape of the stuck. Also participants are were encouraged to hold the stuck position for some moments, so as to sink deeply into the feelings, emotions and sensations, present in the body-mind at that moment. At this point in the process, all individuals were encouraged to verbalize, a simple acknowledgement by sharing the mood , visual image or sensation of their sculpture, by using the austere sentence structure, I see, I feel, I sense.
After modelling the stuck, in this case a physical representation of the current reality of each person’s relationship to the climate crisis. I invited everyone to sense into the promptings of their bodies, to release themselves from the stuck and move towards a more sustainable position, better known as an emerging future. My guidance in the midst of this release, was to pause and feel deeply, while letting the body not the mind, initiate the move into the new sculpture. Then when, the second sculpture was fully formed, to also express, what they saw, sense and felt, in the same pared down sentence form, as above.
Having explored making visible each individual’s ‘stuck’ sculpture in a private space. I facilitated the next phase, where group members silently and mindfully, modelled both phases of each of their sculptures and had this witnessed by two peers in the privacy of Zoom breakout rooms. With peers also witnessing each stuck the self-same simple sentence structures. Finally each trio engaged in a generative discussion of the whole process, up and until that point.
My reasons for sharing this prototype;
Much is known, researched and understood about the threat of climate change. Many do dedicate their lives, to counteracting or mitigating against this threat. Nevertheless in my opinion, because of profound existential splits in the human psyche, most human behaviour in the westernized worlds, has not yet demonstrated sufficient adaptability, in the face of this challenge. Whilst the ongoing threat and danger, gets greater and greater in every moment.
Additionally, very little opportunity as far as I see it, is provided in the educational sector for teachers or students to address climate anxiety, stress or distress or even to process it in a generative manner. Being an educational maverick, passionate about systems change in education, as well as Vertical Literacy. I was keen to experiment with the methodologies of SPT and offer them to teachers and students. To encourage more intentional and conscious access to the inner dynamics of their relationship to climate change.
Thus I shaped the design of this session, to create mental space and easeful opportunity, for each participant to fully and bodily engage in their climate angst and related eco anxieties. Whilst also pausing, overactive thought processes, to instigate cooperation with the healing wisdom and intelligence of both heart and body. In the hope of bringing, a more integrated sense of the climate crisis fully into the forefront of each participant’s consciousnesses.
In harnessing the wisdom of the body in this way, the session was crafted to also, allow both students and teachers to fully perceive their own complex interior web of climate related emotions, fears and anxieties. Additionally the session’s inclusive and participative design bypasses the usually rigid institutional hierarchies of higher education. Allowing the wisdom of the body to take the lead, enabled a fully inclusive and and coequal experience to form in the collective social body of those present. Furthermore, in interrupting the incessant tyrrany of cognitive overload and acting the strain out in the form of a sculpture, enabled a healthy psychic space to arise. Out of this clearing, participants reported, they could now reengage in their respective academic activities and fields with renewed energy, and clarity of purpose.
How the learning session occurred
It was useful that the session was dovetailed into sustainability education research, being carried out in WUR and elsewhere, by Robijn van der Sluijs an MA Student, (for more refer to this blog — which covers the whole learning event more generally). This provided some rich context, a background and platform, from which to carry out an experiential prototype exploring this theme. I felt this occasion was an important opportunity, to facilitate an unusua,l if somewhat countercultural session, within the auspices of a higher education institution, where cognitive excellence has almost sacrosanct value.
During that morning there was very little time for specific feedback around the actual embodiment practices, so I felt I was unable to explore more deeply, what had shifted for people when modelling the climate change stuck process. As this session is usually designed to take place over a full two hours. From which a far better set of feedback might be normally harvested, helping ascertain more precisely the actual value of the practice to individual participants. Nevertheless it was reassuring to witness how smoothly my session proceeded. Including how people flowed easily, into the small collective witnessing breakout groups, despite academia’s cultural allergy to embodiment, as well as the vulnerability and transparency that the ‘stuck’ sharing process necessitated.
How the session was received
This was a brave group of higher education lecturers and students who were adventurous enough to dive into this experiment, take a pause and fully feel their climate related distress. The feedback that I remember, was that participants resonated deeply with the mindfulness practices and the consequent expansion of their experiential connection to the nested wholeness of their mind-body systems. Plus they expressed a desire to connect and situate their work more consciously within the physical aspect of living systems. Others expressed joy, healing and wonder, at fully connecting with their body, which at that moment stood in stark contrast, to the conventional life of an academic being predominantly, situated in the head.
Conclusion and Learning
In higher education’s understandable rush towards solution focussed research, the sector engages in research education and exploration that largely ignores that the climate crisis, is a byproduct of a collective mindset or worldview. These mostly invisible phenomena are essentially at the root cause of harm to all environmental systems. Whilst academic adminsitrators, are far from oblivious, to the existential risks posed by climate change to human civilisation. For the most part, they ignore the corrosive and insidious threat of climate angst to their educators wellbeing, including a worrying disassociation from the cumulative psychic overload on their young students well being. Especially as these young people are facing consciously or unconsciously, the prospect of a barely habitable future on planet earth.
Furthermore whilst fully in the midst of these and other necessary engagements, what is sorely and systemically neglected in higher education institutions, is the emotional and psychological effects that climate change inflicts on singular individuals, inclusive of teachers, students and in fact on almost all academics. Learning systems need urgent reform, to disembed from this avoidance, to be safe enough for learners and educators alike, to constructively reflect on their mortality, grief, fear, anxiety, powerlessness and hopelessness, plus any other similar feelings that are induced by the climate crisis and other impending systemic collapses.
Ignoring these individual psychic effects, plus the intensification of the collective shared social burdens, are a toxic invisible leeching of personal energies and communal resources. Both the psychic avoidance and denial , as well as the emotional resistance to this climate reality, are to me, slowly poisoning the substrate of educational culture, as well suppressing a well of valuable data and information, out of which radically unprecedented responses, might emerge in response to the shared predicament of climate angst and denial.
In most conventional educational institutions these feelings are almost impossible to admit, let alone engage with and express in dialogue. The opening up of educators, lecturers and academics to their own and each others emotional realities and vulnerabilities, gives implicit permission for students to do the same. In sincerely admitting shared fallibility, with genuine vulnerability, educational leaders, role models and instructors can make space for a phenomena that moves from mere notions of equality, to offering a powerfully inclusive emotional reality. Freely admitting and owning this shared sense of all pervasive powerlessness, in the face of global crisis, might allow teachers, students and other stakeholders, to open up to these emotional realities and recognise, the enormous depth and range of the shared emotional conundrums, within which our species is currently engulfed.
A first step to opening into this conversation might be, for all stakeholders in learning systems and institutions, to move towards a healthier emotional connection with the climate crisis through the timeless evolutionary wisdom of the body!
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About the author: Dave Pendle is synthesising almost 30 years experience in non profit enterprises with over 40 years of deep personal development experience. He is a teacher and transformational agent, keen to help shape education that is fit for a new paradigm. He aims to develop ecosystem leaders who embrace that they were born for this moment. He helps evolve their capacities to inspire and uplift themselves, stakeholders and systems to create a world that works for everyone.
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