Follow the conversations and collaborations that happened in Hyderabad, India
Transformative Action and the Future of Higher Education
Submitted by University Team on Tue, 2008-12-09 19:48.
This past week, we hosted a workshop with Scott Sherman, the founder of the Transformative Action Institute, and his colleague, Shan, now finishing up his degree at UC-Santa Cruz. At its core, transformative action is about exposing injustice, and offering a better vision for the future: one that wins over adversaries and fosters meaningful collaboration.
Scott designed a course that takes students through a process of personal transformation--first pressing them to identify their passions and their vision for a better world, and then challenging them to create a blueprint for change --in Ashoka terms, for making their new idea a reality. He dares to teach about innovation and creativity in a way that's both innovative and creative--an all-too-foreign concept on college campuses.
And the response has been wild. It's been taught at universities across the country, from UCLA to Yale, and now at one of our own Changemaker Campuses, Cornell. In just a few hours of talking with Scott, our teams at JHU and UMD had already taken steps to launch the course in the coming months.
The week brought home the similarities to our own program. I've lately been struck by the amount of head-nodding that seems to greet us every time we explain the program. And it was in talking with Scott that I finally understood why. Transformative action builds upon many existing principles and theories--from nonviolent action, to positive psychology. As a result, it simply provides a framework and a vocabulary for issues that most in "our generation" know already. Consider it the permission-giver. Our program, too, is the next natural step in a series of trends and movements currently taking shape in higher education and the world at large--whether you're talking about breaking down the walled gardens currently in place on college campuses, or building up a more entrepreneurial generation of creative problem-solvers. Yet in advancing social entrepreneurship--and the attitude, the principles, and the strategies behind it--we have suddenly tapped into a vehicle capable of bringing all of these parts together, and realizing a new vision for universities and the world in which they sit.
Scott designed a course that takes students through a process of personal transformation--first pressing them to identify their passions and their vision for a better world, and then challenging them to create a blueprint for change --in Ashoka terms, for making their new idea a reality. He dares to teach about innovation and creativity in a way that's both innovative and creative--an all-too-foreign concept on college campuses.
And the response has been wild. It's been taught at universities across the country, from UCLA to Yale, and now at one of our own Changemaker Campuses, Cornell. In just a few hours of talking with Scott, our teams at JHU and UMD had already taken steps to launch the course in the coming months.
The week brought home the similarities to our own program. I've lately been struck by the amount of head-nodding that seems to greet us every time we explain the program. And it was in talking with Scott that I finally understood why. Transformative action builds upon many existing principles and theories--from nonviolent action, to positive psychology. As a result, it simply provides a framework and a vocabulary for issues that most in "our generation" know already. Consider it the permission-giver. Our program, too, is the next natural step in a series of trends and movements currently taking shape in higher education and the world at large--whether you're talking about breaking down the walled gardens currently in place on college campuses, or building up a more entrepreneurial generation of creative problem-solvers. Yet in advancing social entrepreneurship--and the attitude, the principles, and the strategies behind it--we have suddenly tapped into a vehicle capable of bringing all of these parts together, and realizing a new vision for universities and the world in which they sit.
