Education and research that brings blessing - speech by Alexander Schieffer

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH THAT BRINGS BLESSING
by Dr. Alexander Schieffer
TRANS4M Center for Social Innovation, Geneva, Switzerland
www.trans-4-m.com

Brief Speech given at the Morning Service at the World Council of Churches
August 2, 2010

I. OVERVIEW: REINVENTING RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

The vision of our Geneva based organization TRANS4M Center for Social Innovation is to reinvent education and research so that it innovatively engages with the burning social issues that a society is facing. Education and Research that truly responds to the burning needs of a society, for us, can be called “education and research that brings blessing”.

When we talk about “blessing” then we suggest, however, to not only focus on the burning needs of a particular society, but also on the gifts (the “blessings”) that each society, each culture has received. Research and education, as we understand it, needs to build on and activate these particular gifts. In other words, the often isolated emphasis on “poverty”, to our mind, dramatically overshadows the existing wealth in a particular context, be it in form of local knowledge, wisdom, values or relationships.

The dual focus on “burning needs and shining gifts” is hence at the very heart of our approach to research and education. But that is only the starting point. We need to go deeper and understand the major characteristics of an education and research that ultimately results in social innovation. For us there are four core characteristics, or the “four trans”

II. CORE CHARACTERISTICS OF “EDUCATION THAT BRINGS BLESSING”

Achieving innovation requires the stepping out of comfort zones, to move beyond existing borders. This “moving beyond” is reflected in “the four trans”: transdisciplinary, transcultural, transpersonal and transformational. I shall now introduce each of them:

1. Education and Research to bring “Blessing” need to be transdisciplinary: engaging with complex social issues requires not only that we simultaneously draw on the large variety of social sciences disciplines, but furthermore, that we bring these different disciplines in creative interaction with each other. Thereby we transcend conventional disciplinary borders. To foster such processes, education and research programmes need to purposefully bring together representatives from such diverse disciplines, and equally curriculum design needs to reflect this “trans-disciplinarity”.

2. Research and Education to bring “Blessing” need to be transcultural:
Until now, the vast majority of e.g. business, economics and development education, as well as research methods and methodologies are invented, developed and designed by the west, primarily by the US and Europe. For us, the starting point of all our educational and research processes is, however, the firm rooting in the cultural and social contexts we are active in. Once participants are strongly connected to their own “local identity” we facilitate the creative interaction between local and global knowledge perspectives, thereby entering the territory of innovation. Again, we find innovation in the “trans”, in the “in between” of various cultures, belief systems, faiths, in between the local and global

3. Research and Education to bring “blessing” need to be transpersonal:
For education and research to have a strong impact, they need to go beyond their existing individualistic orientation. It can’t be any longer about “my personal upgrading”, about “my degree”, about “my PHD”. In our Masters Programme on Social and Economic Transformation, for example, each participant engages, progressively, in individual, organizational and societal transformation.

4. Research and Education to bring “blessing” need to be transformational:
The final and all-encompassing feature of our programmes is their “transformational” character. Each programme takes the participant and his or her organization through a trajectory “from fundamental research to transformative action”.

How then do we put these core features in practice?

III. EDUCATION THAT BRINGS BLESSING, IN PRACTICE

We started our work by offering masters and doctoral programmes, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Jordan, UK and the US. These programmes focus on social and economic innovation and are designed along the core features that I introduced. In each case we from TRANS4M Geneva work together with universities who accredited these programmes. Our friend and colleague, Dr. Sam Rima, for example, invited us into Bethel University, with whom we now offer a Doctor of Ministry Programme for Social and Economic Innovation.

We recognized, however, that the programmes themselves are not enough. What is further needed, is a more fundamental, institutional transformation on the level of the university. In other words, it is not enough, that the programmes are transdisciplinary, transcultural, transpersonal and transformational; much more, the university itself need to be reconceived along similar lines. This is a big step, but a university, that stands on these four pillars, has shifted from a “degree factory” to a “catalyst for societal renewal”. We call these universities “universities-4-humanity”. Imagine, the “blessing” that education and research could bring, if universities saw themselves in such new light, authentically serving humanity.

We are currently about to set up a global (or better: transcultural, and trans-faith) movement of such “universities-4-humanities”, each of them concerned with transforming the society they are lodged in. Major players within this movement are the Muslim based Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development in Egypt, the Buddhist based Sarvodaya Institute for Higher Learning in Sri Lanka, the more secular oriented School for Transformation of Deutsche Telekom in Germany and the Christian based Chinyika Village Learning Center. The Village learning Center in Zimbabwe, by the way, is the direct result of a project that came out of our Southern African Masters Programme. This project lead to food security of initially 20.000 and ultimately close to 200.000 people in Zimbabwe.

With all these Universities-4-Humanity we work together to co-create a new institutional approach to universities, so that these can truly serve society. Together, we co-creators of Universities-4-Humanity see an enormous potential to increase the potential blessing that research and education – reconceived in this new light – could bring to the world. Imagine! Perhaps we can even work together with you here, with ECLOF, with the WCC or other organizations present.

Imagine!!