School as a Holding Environment for Social Change
This is the third essay in a three-part series on leading educational change in schools through the lens of Theory U, a change management system derived in the business world for leading from the emerging future. In the first essay, I shared a few tools for how to begin to confront your own beliefs and biases that may be obstructing change. In the second essay, we expanded the theory to be about leading change within your classroom through action research. At the end of the second essay, I acknowledged the difficulty that can come when we invite the unknown into our classroom. This is a much easier thing to do when you are supported by a community of colleagues, all seeking to create conditions for daring to invite change — which is the focus for this final installment.
Cultivating community with colleagues
Deborah Meier, an American educator credited with founding the small schools movement, wrote in her book In Schools We Trust about the importance of cultivating a culture of trust and community to foster collegial critique and professional authority. When a community can support and challenge one another, both individually and collectively, it comes with discomfort, but it “pushes us to rethink old ideas, to go beyond cliches and preset limits on what’s thinkable” (pp. 59–60). She likens that discomfort to the same kind of development that Piaget discusses with children moving through cognitive stages of development, and how we are forced to seek new balances when we are confronted by the unexpected.
In spite of the fact that teachers strive to make their classrooms holding environments for children’s development, it is rare that schools are organized to be holding environments for the development of the adults that work in them. As a result, teachers frequently feel siloed at best, and antagonistic at worst, when interacting with colleagues. This makes me wonder: What it would mean for organizations to exist in such a way as to become the holding environment that would support evolution for their members, no matter their ages?
Our continued human development
Developmental psychologist, author, and educator Robert Kegan wrote a book over 20 years ago called The Evolving Self which synthesizes various theories of human development. The essence of his theory is that we go through evolution as individuals, and these stages can be described as “the constitutions of the self” as pictured below. Transitioning through each of the stages requires a critical shift, where we let go of something that previously defined our identity. When something defines who we are, it is so ingrained within us that we cannot separate ourselves from it. When we let go and allow it to become something we have, we can hold it more at a distance and examine its shape and form.
In brief, the first stage is the impulsive stage, which is best imagined through the eyes of a toddler. A toddler’s existence is pure and intense impulses, such that they don’t merely have impulses, their entire being is defined by them! As the individual moves through to the imperial stage, they recognize the impulses as something they have, but they feel defined by their desires, needs, and interests. This stage is typical amongst older children and teenagers, who see relationships primarily as a means to satisfy their impulses. In the interpersonal stage, relationships become the thing that defines their identity, and wants and needs become the things that they have. The fourth stage is the institutional stage where relationships become something that they have, and institutions or beliefs become the thing with which they are primarily identified. In the final stage, the interindividual stage, we take on a more systems lens and recognize that we are not defined by beliefs or jobs, but by our shared humanity.
To reiterate, the self is identified with the object, then we move through a period of differentiation, and then to resolve the new stage, there’s a process of reintegration. This development process may sound familiar because I addressed it in the first essay, when we talked about Donald Winnicott’s idea of human development. Kegan uses that very first early stage of child development, when the being is incorporated with the parent figure and then begins to do this exploration process, leaving that safe space and venturing out to the world, differentiating from it and then reintegrating with it. I think this is a really powerful way of thinking about human development. And when we don’t often apply to adults, we tend to see it as something that happens only for infants. If we think about babies, there’s just this natural evolutionary instinct to support that development, but this becomes something we’re much less inclined to do for adults. We believe adults “should know better.”
However, Kegan’s idea is that we go through these stages throughout our entire lives, so we need one another to support that growth as much as children need that support. When you’re differentiating, it becomes extremely scary because the person who you thought you were turns out to be not who you are at all. That feeling of a loss of self can be so frightening that instead of really going through that process of completely differentiating and integrating a new self concept, we just revert back to who we know we’ve been, to who we felt comfortable with.
Thinking about the holding environment as something that we can actually do for each other really poses a very interesting thing for organizations, and especially for schools. Classrooms obviously can create that holding environment. I think this concept is less challenging, because many teachers see themselves as nurturers. When I worked in high schools, I frequently saw myself as helping to usher these teenagers into new versions of themselves, to seize their voices, to find their passions, to feel strong as individuals and communities in the world. We can also think about this same concept on a whole school level: How are we creating a holding environment for each other as adults to go through the hard processes of becoming ourselves over and over?
Living inside of the tilt
One of the most powerful things about Kegan and stage development is that he sees that in fact, we spend very little time as sure selves within a stage. In fact, we spend more time in between those stages! So not only do we have to go through a process of continual evolution, we also have to learn to live in the tilt, which can be a very unsettling prospect.
Personally, I have been exploring what it might mean to live in liminal spaces. I came across this concept during a particularly liminal space in my life when I was deciding whether or not I should accept a marriage proposal. I was drawn to some contemplative literature by Richard Rohr when he talked about what it meant to hold the between space. I’ve since come to recognize liminality as a concept that spans spiritual practice. Arnold van Gennep, a European ethnographer and folklorist, first used the concept of liminality in describing rites of passage at the turn of the 20th century. His work identified three-stages: rites of incorporation, of transition, and of reincorporation.
These stages span different spiritual, societal, and psychoanalytic traditions. The stage of transition is known as the liminal space. Richard Rohr describes it as a place “betwixt and between.” The way that I always picture it is that you’re on a swinging trapeze and, and it’s that moment you let go of the first bar and you trust that the second one will come, but you are in the middle; you’re suspended in the air. And then, just imagine that this is all being filmed on a slow motion camera, and so that moment in the middle can just seem like a total eternity. I think many of us fear that in-between space so much that we don’t ever let go of the bar to receive the second. If we think about the courage needed to release, and the courage needed to hold that between space, then we can begin to ask good questions about what it means to support ourselves — and others — to go through these processes. What are the conditions that are necessary for us to hold each other through these difficult stages of transition?
Our new collective consciousness
Beyond our tribal or organizational ways of communing together as a people, technology and the Internet has provided new digital spaces for us to come together. We are becoming a completely connected species, which is totally bizarre and unprecedented in all of human history. Sometimes I get really fascinated to watch live social interactions in the comments threads of political articles. If you’ve never really read the comments section with an ethnographer lens, I encourage you to take a look! When you do this, you start to recognize the stages of individual development through a societal perspective.
I heard it said on the OnBeing podcast with internet pioneer and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain that when you look at our behaviors on the internet through an overview effect perspective, you can begin to see that we’re developing as a species collectively, almost moving through the typical stages of human development. Oftentimes, in reading the comments sections of any trending article, you can see that oftentimes, we’re behaving collectively from the impulsive to imperial stage. Schlain suggested that we could have more compassion for ourselves collectively, recognizing that it hasn’t been very long since we’ve become this sort of collective organism. She said, “We proactively can evolve the internet and infuse it with character strengths. That is really a framework to think about a healthy evolution of the internet, instead of throwing your hands up and saying this thing is out of our control, and it’s doing all these things. We — just as we’re raising a child, we need to shepherd this to its maturity, and infuse it with our own sense of character.”
What might be the tools that enable this kind of radical compassion to exist? My hunch is that it goes right back to the beginning of where we started this series. It starts with you. It expands to your three-feet of influence. Then maybe, the third step, is that we acknowledge that this brilliant collective evolution is happening. We acknowledge that each person, no matter how old they are or where we encounter them, is going through a difficult process of becoming themselves. Just as young humans need support and care to grow courageously, older humans need that too. It’s not criticism but care that gives creatures the ability to become their best selves. Criticism makes us want to withdraw and fall apart completely, but care makes us hope and trust that we can actually let go of who we were and move into the next stage.
I don’t want to be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic about the way that this is all going to go down. I want to stand in the tragic gap and say, OK, it could go either way, but maybe it helps to see things differently. Maybe it helps to see ourselves as both facilitating a holding environment for ourselves, for our students, and for our colleagues, and then also, for us collectively.
In the midst of incredibly societal polarization which has become so transparent through our new collective consciousness via social media, it can be challenging to see hope. So as you embark on leading change within your various contexts, I want to leave you with two reminders from one of my favorite educator-activists, Paolo Freire. The first reminder: “it takes time in history to make history.” And the second: “There is no tomorrow without a project, without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of that tomorrow viable. It is in that sense that I have said on different occasions that I am hopeful not out of stubbornness, but due to an existential imperative” (Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, p. 26).
Further Explorations:
Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished by Paolo Freire
We Make the Road by Walking by Paolo Freire & Myles Horton
In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization by Deborah Meier
“Part 1: How to Be an Adult — Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development” by Natali Morad
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer by Richard Rohr
