Co-creating the Emerging Future with “Gen Z”
High School Teachers and Students Reshaping Education in Taiwan
Read the article in Traditional Chinese, translation by kind courtesy of Crystal Huang
What point have we reached now, in the critique and reshaping of our education systems? Back in the late seventies, Pink Floyd’s rebellious cry of “Hey, Teachers, Leave Them Kids Alone!” in the hit song “Another Brick in The Wall” advocated for an approach to teaching that would guide young people towards the discovery of their own abilities and inclinations, rather than subjecting them to the imposition of pedagogical frameworks that suffocated creativity, individuality and critical capacity.
Over four decades later, the work that a group of Taiwanese educators has been bringing into high schools in Taipei in the context of the u.lab 2x — Accelerator for Systems Transformation is a living example of the inversion of those old learning structures. It harnesses the approach and methodologies offered by Otto Scharmer’s Theory U teachings: where the student becomes a co-pilot of the learning process, or is even put into the driver’s seat.
This, however, is a particularly bold stance in the Chinese cultural context where young people are typically expected to forge their way into adulthood through meeting the — sometimes very rigid — educational and social expectations of their families. Counter-current educational models such as the internationally-recognized early childhood Anji Play curriculum that is “grounded in love, risk, joy, engagement, and reflection”, which Adam Yukelson wrote about in 2018, are generally few and far between.
The Big Idea
The Taiwanese team of six educators, facilitators and practitioners came together in late 2020 under the umbrella of an initiative that they named “Co-creating the emerging future with Gen Z in Taiwan,” to embark upon the u.lab 2x journey that launched in February 2021.
Chun-Ying (Roach) Chen is a Science teacher, Crystal C. Y. Huang is a coach and facilitator, Jayce Pei Yu Lee is a visual artist, Menglin Chu is a teacher of Social Studies, Civil Ethics and Virtue, Yuchung Cheng is a Chinese language Art teacher, and Yi-Tzu Lee teaches English as a foreign language.
Their particular focus has been to invite teenagers and high school students into an adventure of exploring what it means to imagine their future from new vantage points, through the application of Theory U and Presencing methodologies as offered by the u.lab 2x experience. They have observed that “at this stage of a student’s development, the degree of plasticity is considerable.”
Who Needs to Play?
Upon exploring the system through the technique of 3D Mapping, the Taiwanese team realised that their project would need to take into account entities such as: the government education authorities, parents and parent groups, teacher groups, mainstream and social media who have influence and control over the right to speak in education, university academic units, related institutions for teacher training, and school organisations.
After having mapped the wider system, however, they chose to narrow the scope of their project to the more immediate players that they could more directly influence: the high school teachers, high school students, and graduates within five years of graduation.
New Kinds of Relationships
High school students are at a point in their lives where they are “curious and confused about what it means to be growing up or looking forward to the future.” In the Chinese cultural and educational context, there is a considerable lack of space to “breathe” and “explore” freely. The ambiguity and uncertainty of shifts currently unfolding in the world seem to present young people with choices that point to both risk and opportunity: on the one hand, an environment riddled with restrictions; on the other hand, a chance to boldly and collectively explore the boundaries of the existing, and push beyond them.
The question then becomes: in this process of exploration, can high school students find out who they are, what is most meaningful to them, and who they want to become? What might it mean to include their imagination and their wholeheartedness in the construction of the future world that they want to live in?
Moving into Spaces of the Heart
Yi-Tzu observes that through the practices of opening the heart and paying more attention to emotions and feelings — where role-modelling of openness, candour and vulnerability on the part of the teacher speaks much more eloquently than theory — the students begin to see and reveal themselves to a greater degree and establishing with them new sorts of relationships.
Yuchung cautions: one important lesson that she has learnt is to refrain from the impulse of imparting opinions, suggestions or advice. “Don’t even hold them in your own mind, of how you think it ‘should be’.”
Connecting within the Realm of the Non-verbal
Jayce remarks that Theory U encourages forms of communication which are very effective in presenting thoughts in non-verbal ways. This enables teenagers to better connect with a given situation and thereby also find and craft their own unique forms of expression. Crystal adds that she has noticed how the tools in the hands of the students come alive and are able to shift empathy in unprecedented ways.
Making It Happen
The Taiwanese team found that the available theories and resources that could help open up new types of inquiry within the education system were mostly tailored to business people and adults. The presentation, languaging and contextualisation of the resources had hitherto been built mostly on adult learning and could not easily appeal to teenagers.
This is why they set out to shape a modified framework that could be relatable and engaging for their students, using language, perspectives and themes familiar to young people. In order to better understand the stakeholders of their project, they conducted interviews with youth, college students and graduates.
Flexibility and Personalisation of the Tools
This helped the teacher team to create prototypes and small-step classroom experiments around how to introduce the Theory U tools in more approachable ways for the students: for instance the “Stakeholder Interview” was reworded in a way that young people can better understand; the Four Levels of Listening was made more tangible for them through a familiar game, called “Passing the Ball”, which enabled them to grasp through direct, lived experience, the differences in levels of listening.
In the “Passing the Ball’’ exercise, carried out during Drama class, the students in pairs or in a circle are invited to throw the ball to one another: the catcher receives the ball with openness and everyone pays attention to where the ball goes, and how it gets there. This is an apt manner of physically representing how we ‘listen’, where throwing the ball resembles talking, and receiving the ball can be likened to listening.
Thus the students will naturally start to pick up the subtle nuances — through direct physical experience — of notions such as: centrality, periphery, relationship, observation, unity, attention, inclusion, exclusion, rhythm, timing, impatience, power, loss, empathy, synergy. The children are encouraged to pay attention to their own mental state and to team and group dynamics, and subsequently write about, reflect upon, and discuss, their embodied experience. The teachers have found this to be an effective way to convey a lived sense of the levels of listening, in a manner that the students can relate to.
From Stakeholder Interviews, to Coaching Circles, Dialogue Walks, Scribing, the Social Presencing Theater (SPT) Stuck exercise, Journaling Questions, each teacher shared their own preferred tool but the consensus was that the richness of the Theory U palette resides in the infinite ways in which each student can use them as standalones or in freely combined manners.
Learning to Loosen and Let Go
Whilst they have been working with an array of clear and immediately applicable methodologies, the Taiwanese team has also understood the importance of surrendering to not always having ready-made answers to emerging questions. The learning about themselves has often been about setting aside their own impatience; about letting go and letting come; about admitting to not knowing — to themselves, and to their students. “By learning to loosen and let go”, observes Yuchung, “some things will just unfold naturally, according to their own rhythm.”
Nuances of Language: Barrier or Opportunity?
One question that intrigued me particularly in my conversation with the Taiwanese team was the topic of how they approached translating the language of Theory U from English to Chinese.
What emerged from the conversation was that I was in fact asking the wrong question. Translation in this case was not so much about how to find fitting equivalences in vocabulary when transitioning from English to Chinese, but more about how to convey the essence of each methodology through the aliveness of first-hand experiences.
Yuchung chuckles. “In general, teenagers don’t really listen to what others say: they live mostly in their own space.”
This is why the teachers have been looking for ways to design experiences that include mutual participation, reviewing, questioning and reflecting back on those experiences.
Holding Discomfort
Self, Others and Discovery
Taiwanese youngsters are not typically brought up to think in terms of searching for their own, unique, personal value. Emphasis is placed on self discipline and diligence, and learning is approached with a view to achieving prescribed outcomes, with the attention turned towards the outside. Therefore, veering towards learning methods and processes that focus on exploring notions of “self” and “innermost calling” is a deep paradigm shift.
In the words of Yuchung: “In this process, we ultimately need to return to ourselves.”
Jayce and Yi-Tzu admit that allowing space for questioning and pondering, without hurry, is an essential part of the journey for the educators themselves, so that they can be empowered to enact the change together, through shared intention and a trust that gets built over time. Crystal remarks on the importance of staying aligned with each other on intention, whilst also staying open to adapting along the way, and being able to integrate the work into the busy-ness of daily life. “We must remain fluid, like water.”
Shedding the Former Self
Yi-Tzu speaks about the responsibility and challenge of holding her students’ dilemma, when they ask: “Teacher, am I therefore called to throw away my old self, and everything that I have been brought up to build towards, for the past ten years?”
Seeking ways to best support their students in their inner and outer journeys is an important and urgent responsibility that these teachers hold, with humility and passion, as they accompany them into exploring the territory of their emerging future self.
Heartfelt thanks to Crystal, Jayce, Yuchung and Yi-Tzu for the interview and their involvement and infinite patience in correcting my Chinese, including double-checking all parts of the post-production for accuracy ; to Priya, Emma, Hannah and Randi for the editorial support; to Stefan for the very valuable advice on final touches regarding video production.
You might also be interested in watching this series of interviews with Otto Scharmer on the topic of Education in China?
Want to join the u.lab 2x Accelerator for Systems Transformation programme with your team? Find out more and apply before 7th Jan 2022, here.
Read the article in Traditional Chinese, translation by kind courtesy of Crystal Huang
