Teaching Conscious Social Change

The Conscious Social Change 40-hour curriculum is designed to offer a highly-interactive, holistic, direct-experience learning process. We believe this represents a more transformative and comprehensive approach to community development, leadership, and empowerment. The design and the delivery of the curriculum are interlinked and reinforcing, guided by our philosophy and theories of change. Following is an explanation of each aspect of its design and delivery methodology:  

Experiential:

To support an individual’s inner wisdom and intuitive sense as well as to support deeper understanding through applied learning, our curriculum is taught with an experiential approach, emphasizing learning through personal experience and incorporating a holistic balance between cognitive, social-emotional, and somatic or body-based practices. This also means that we embrace the unique perspectives and experience-based lessons that our participants bring into the classroom and will utilize in their change work. This reinforces an individual's sense of their own value. Additionally, we encourage self-reflection not only as part of the personal transformation process, but as a regular practice of supporting direct-experience-derived wisdom.

Holistic – Mind, Body, Emotion: 

Similarly, much of our material, especially the personal transformation and mindful leadership skills, are delivered in a way that encourages a direct experience on three levels – emotional, physical and cognitive. This reinforces the ability of a change agent to cultivate self-awareness in themselves and presence with others. It helps individuals identify when they may be out of balance, ignoring signals from the body, heart or mind about a particular situation to which they must attend. Finally, the more we become present and attend to our own needs, the more we have compassion for others and the capacity to listen deeply and determine how best to respond.

Participatory:

We believe strongly that our role is to serve only as a facilitator and we trust the process of experiential learning. We do not impose our values, our social issue priorities or our solutions. Instead, we coach each participant in their social issue diagnosis, the crafting of their theory of change and their organizational development to support their process of informed decision-making. Where helpful, we also share best practices that may be adopted and adapted for use by our ventures.  In interacting with our participants we use a process of Inquiry Without Imposition, with an overarching goal of catalyzing self-sufficiency, and we teach our students how to use the same empowering methods among their own beneficiaries. We encourage our participants to diagnose issues with their communities and we offer tools that incorporate more visual diagramming to engage all stakeholders, including those who may not read.  At the end of the day, we embrace the potency of local initiation and ownership in and of itself, even if implementation may not always be what we envisioned. We honor the fact that, for young women in certain circumstances, just to be willing to advance social change and human rights in their communities is often a courageous and radical act. We acknowledge the remarkable wisdom, resourcefulness and creativity in problem-solving among local communities, and we recognize there is usually more for us to learn than for us to teach.

Engaging the Logical and Creative Minds:

In some contexts, educational systems emphasize knowledge accumulation and rote memorization over critical thinking skills, including the capacity to reflect on a problem, analyze and synthesize information, draw conclusions from patterns and gaps, and question assumptions. Yet creativity is vital for innovation and problem-solving. Interestingly, science has proven that meditation supports greater creativity, essential for social innovation. A study published in Frontiers in Cognition on April 19, 2015, Lorenza Colzato demonstrated a link between certain forms of meditation and two primary drivers of creativity, divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking involves inviting as many new ideas as possible, such as is usually performed in a brainstorming activity. Convergent thinking is where a solution is generated from all the possibilities. The study discovered that open monitoring meditation, which involves being aware of all stimuli around you, improved divergent thinking.  

Further, the ability to deconstruct a problem, look at it in a different way, analyze the way things work or don’t work, and devise an innovative solution is critical to a change agent’s ability to advance social change. Therefore we integrate opportunities for problem solving, analysis, logic reasoning, pattern observation, and artistic creativity and expression. The process of inquiry and dialogue is favored over lecture to deliver information. Even the use of notes on chalkboards, flip charts and white boards is geared towards illustrating a process (the action steps or outcomes of such action steps when applied), a framework (a structure by which to guide a process), a tool (a more specific application) and conclusions (as a result of a process or dialogue) rather than straight dictation of information. 

Integrating Personal and Social Transformation:

The curriculum contains roughly half its content in the personal transformation and conscious leadership sphere and roughly half in the social entrepreneurship sphere. For example, each day is opened and closed with a moment of meditation, breathing, or silence that offers space for self-reflection. This supports participants in leaving behind the stresses that may have accompanied them into the room as we begin the day and, at the end of the day, allowing time for reflection and integration of the lessons and experiences from that day’s work. Each day we also integrate a trauma-healing practice to address post-traumatic and chronic stress.

In most of the cultures in which Global Grassroots has worked, there is little time for, value placed on, or even awareness of the need for personal renewal. The women and girls we support are often overworked and tired due to living extremely impoverished and manual labor-intensive lives.  Further, stress, trauma, malnutrition, disease and household obligations leave many without any personal time or space. Yet, personal transformation is critical to a change agent’s effectiveness as a leader in rebuilding community consciously, compassionately, ethically and in alignment with what is most needed for self and the other.  

Practice:

We consider practice important on multiple levels. The concept of daily practice has its roots in yogic traditions and various other wisdom traditions. The concept of practice reinforces one’s commitment to self-reflection and supports the development of personal discipline through daily ritual. Finally, the process of personal transformation, healing, deepened self-awareness and change takes time, and the actions that drive that evolution often require a lifetime of continued practice. We believe that a commitment to daily personal practice is supportive of personal transformation as well as optimal social change. Therefore we model a commitment to personal practice each day of our training program.  In particular we integrate a very specific form of movement, breathing and meditation called Breath-Body-Mind (BBM) that, when practiced over time, has a scientifically-demonstrated impact on the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress. We practice BBM each day to ensure participants experience the maximum benefits and learn the skill well enough to practice on their own or teach it to others. Additionally, because we rarely seek to impose one particular process or way of doing things on our participants, we introduce a wide range of contemplative practices that can be of benefit to the individual, allowing the opportunity for participants to choose what works best for them. These techniques include walking and sitting meditation, mindfulness, Qigong, yoga, and other breathing and movement techniques.

Local Context:

Finally, the Conscious Social Change curriculum, developed by our founder, Gretchen Steidle, and evolved over many years with invaluable contributions from Global Grassroots staff and participants, is designed to work in any educational, religious or cultural context. Aspects of the curriculum have been taught to graduate business school students and educators in the US and to women without formal education in Rwanda and Uganda. It was accredited as a 3.0 semester course at the University of Virginia, and has also been taught at Dartmouth College. It has been utilized with communities of diverse religious orientation, developmental disabilities, and socio-economic status, and has been offered to date to participants from eight different countries. Finally, we incorporate into our curriculum and our training program for trainers the skills and capabilities for working with trauma sensitivity and working within a developing country context across different religions, languages, educational backgrounds, and cultural customs.