AI heart in fire storm

Open-hearted learning

AI heart in fire storm
Credit: Pixabay

In this thought-provoking post, Glen Cousquer, a distinguished educator and researcher at The University of Edinburgh, delves into the pressing need for a pedagogical shift in how we approach learning and teaching amidst the ecological and social crises defining our era. Drawing from his rich background in sustainability and deep listening practices, Glen explores how an “open-hearted” approach to learning can transform educational spaces into forums for profound personal and collective transformation. He advocates for a series of paradigm shifts—from hubris to humility, from willfulness to willingness, and from cognitive engagement to heartfelt presence—that can deeply alter our engagement with complex global challenges. This post belongs to the Jan-March Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: In-class Perspectives to Engaging and Empowering Learners


The world so many of our students are born into, care about and want to contribute to healing, is in turmoil. There is growing recognition that the extractive and exploitative individualism, values and false accounting of modern society has shifted the burden of costs onto the environment and future generations. This legacy has, in turn, created an immense challenge for educators, who must somehow recognise that we live in “an age of profound disruption where something is ending and dying and something else is wanting to be born through us” (Otto Scharmer, quoted in Pomeroy, 2024). We are thus challenged to teach in a liminal time, a time between worlds (Rowson and Pascal, 2021). In such times, what we choose to pay attention to and the quality of our attentional and relational practices are of crucial importance. The nurturing of such practices can, I propose, benefit from a series of shifts.

Yes, we can logically recognise the interconnections between the climate, nature and other emergencies we face and rationalise that a more collaborative systematic approach is needed to address these polycrises. But this is not enough. As Iain McGilchrist (2021) argues, such a recognition is born of the same grasping, apprehending left-hemisphere mode of attention that has given rise to all re-presentations of the “world out there”. This is further fed by the hubris of problematising and problem solving materialists who conceive of a problem out there, without recognising how reality is in-formed by the quality of our individual and collective consciousness. The first shift is therefore from hubris into humility.

A shift from hubris into humility, a sacred pause in front of the deeper mystery of the universe allows us to recognise that our problem statements are incomplete. Leaning into and learning to be with with the polycrises that our failing civilisation has created leads us to recognise how these crises impact our inner worlds, our individual and collective nervous systems. This shift in attention allows us to recognise that the global mental health crisis we face is a product of and co-dependent with the existential nature of the issues facing global society. Ours is not a poly-crisis but a meta-crisis reflecting the deep entanglements between our emotional and spiritual health and wellbeing and the relational health of the planetary ecosystem.

How do we work with the grief and overwhelming sense of despair born of inaction and felt helplessness that we have been numbing? The answer, I believe, involves a shift from wilfulness to willingness. This shift is crucial if we are to feel into and through, rather than think about the crises we face. We need to nurture our capacity to hold the storm whilst it rages, allowing it to flow and dissipate. This, in turn teaches us to create holding spaces in which we can learn to metabolise the crisis, learning to resolve it rather than solve it. A shift into willingness involves recognising and allowing. In sitting with discomfort and uncertainty, we can learn to suspend our thinking minds so that they are not always in the driving seat. We can then trust and work with our deeper intelligences, including the intelligence of the heart and the body, to free the energy that becomes trapped and unavailable to us whenever our trauma-response kicks in. This response is intelligent in the short-term: We deny the trauma in order to prepare for fight-flight-freeze. But this trauma then takes up residence in our bodies and affects how we pay attention and the quality of attention we bring to the world. It fragments our nervous systems. Unless we learn to digest, metabolise and integrate the legacy of pain and suffering we have inherited, we will carry this into our work and keep reproducing the past. This is important because a culture that has committed ecocide rather than made peace with nature will unwittingly continue to transmit that pain and perpetuate the struggle. I see this manifesting as a tendency to try to convince people of the need to change through debate without recognising that there is a deeper social field where transformational work is needed. This is where the third and final shift is needed.

A shift from the head to the heart is central to deep listening practices and specifically the shift from debate into dialogue. It involves shifting the place that we listen from so that we are able to meet genuinely and be fully present in a spirit of mutual reciprocity. So often, our listening is guarded, we listen to the facts and with only our thinking minds open to receiving. Such listening is guarded and denies us access to deeper transformation. Listening with an open heart involves a shift from the I-It to the I-Thou and affords us access to energetics that we had previously filtered out and denied. I often describe the journey we take from the head to the heart as the longest journey we can ever take and the most important. It is by prioritising such listening in our classrooms, however, that students can learn to connect with and relate to the real world, to move beyond the outer veil of reality and into the inner light of being and becoming with.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Pomeroy, E. (2024). Living Theory: From Lewin to Scharmer. Organization Development Review, 56(3).

Rowson, J., & Pascal, L. (Eds.). (2021). Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity. Perspectiva.


picture of editor/producerGlen Cousquer

Glen Cousquer is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and recipient of the 2022 RCVS Compassion Award for his work on embedding compassion into teaching and learning and campus culture. He is a recipient of the 2021 EUSA Outstanding Commitment to Social Justice and Sustainability Award and the 2022 and 2020 Social Responsibility and Sustainability Changemaker Awards in recognition of his work on sustainability across the University, including the embedding of deep listening and sustainability into postgraduate training courses for healthcare professionals.

Glen’s research into the health and welfare of pack animals on expedition and across the global mountain tourism industry led to the development of new industry standards and the development of multispecies awareness-based Action Research methodologies to help deliver emergent futures. This work has informed the development of dialogical approaches to establishing communities of practice and inquiry, change theory, and practice for sustainability, as well as more recent work on ecological pilgrimage that has led to the publication of a nature connection text mindfully exploring Edinburgh’s Living Landscape on foot: Wild Places, Wild Encounters. Since February 2018, he has been lecturing on and coordinating the MSc and MVetSci programmes in One Health and Conservation Medicine at The University of Edinburgh.

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