A question of caring

How compassion arises from cultivating inter-dependence

By Duyen Nguyen

“What we’re really trying to do is to add care and kindness back into the equation,” said Mette Miriam Böll, one of the speakers at “What Do We Mean by Systems Change and Why Is It So Difficult in Education?”, the first in a series of virtual conversations on compassionate systems change that began on January 13, 2022 and continues throughout the Spring 2022 semester.

Systems Awareness in Education: A Conversation Series, hosted by MIT Opening Learning, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), and MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore a compassion-based approach — the compassionate systems framework — to addressing the root causes of today’s most pressing issues, beginning with deep change in education and continuing with equity.

Developed by Böll, visiting scientist at J-WEL, and Peter Senge, J-WEL fellow and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the compassionate systems framework seeks to foster what the researchers call a “systems awareness orientation.” They explain that the world is profoundly inter-dependent yet we all often operate under the illusion of separateness, seeing the problems we seek to change as separate from ourselves and issues like poverty, racism, and educational inequity as affecting only a few — not everyone. A systems awareness orientation, by contrast, recognizes the “whole of things.”

“Living systems are not linear and don’t respond to changes in predictable ways like machines. They’re nested, layered, and interconnected.”

“All the big problems of the world have to do with our systems,” Senge said at the opening event, which welcomed over 200 attendees. He explained that, because systems are shaped by both tangible artifacts like metrics and formal structures and by human behaviors and assumptions, “systems change is deeply personal.” To change any system, including school systems and systemic problems like equity and inclusion, it’s necessary to consider one’s own place within the existing system, as well as how others may experience the same reality differently. This is why compassion is integral to systems awareness.

“These are living systems,” Böll said, which adds to the difficulty of changing them, especially deep rooted systems like racial equity in the United States. “Living systems are not linear and don’t respond to changes in predictable ways like machines. They’re nested, layered, and interconnected,” she continued, advocating for thinking of change in terms of growing new ways of thinking and operating rather than as “scaling” proven solutions.

Böll and Senge were joined in the first webinar by Eric Klopfer, professor and head of Comparative Media Studies and Education, and Diana Chapman Walsh, former president of Wellesley College and life member emerita of the MIT Corporation, who moderated the conversation. Along with creating what the presenters called a “community of inquiry,” the conversation series will share ongoing research on developing systems awareness, including the outcomes of efforts to promote the approach in diverse educational settings, from schools in Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Denmark, Canada and the United States to state-wide efforts like are unfolding today in British Columbia and California.

Education must be considered in its totality if new initiatives are to improve outcomes for all students. Böll explained that programs, like social-emotional learning and mindfulness-based meditation, meant to address the current student mental health crisis are “being imposed on systems not structured for them,” thus limiting their effectiveness. “The fabric of the system is flawed and it needs to be redesigned,” she said.

“Longer-term change is possible with a shift in orientation and better tools.”

“Awareness-based action research” would offer “a bottom up, organic approach where people have agency and better understand their local systems,” explained Klopfer, also director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. In other words, longer-term change, led by educators, students and practitioners, is possible with a shift in orientation and better tools.

Those in attendance at the first event reflected on how the themes and questions around how awareness-based systems change related to their own work in breakout sessions and individually. Some of what emerged were the need to broaden our focus in education beyond curriculum and teaching to how students and teachers can “discover one another as their best allies” in education change and moving beyond the “academic obsession” to focusing on individual and collective well-being as a core aim. One person reflected that the compassionate systems framework seemed “a little closer to the indigenous ways of teaching and learning that I grew up with.” The hosts concluded by noting that being able to hear each other’s perspectives is not only a feature of the conversation series, but critical to the work of real systems change.

“Think about how all of our institutions, our laws, our regulations, our customs, can be refreshed into a beautiful, vibrant, multiracial democracy where we all see each other’s humanity.”

During the second webinar of the series titled “ Systems Awareness: Equity, Child and Family Wellbeing, and Healthy Societies,” speakers Michael McAfee and Larissa Duncan continued to touch on the importance of compassionate systems to enact a different possibility for equity in our country. Michael McAfee, President and CEO of Policy Link, said that compassionate systems is necessary because “it is a bridge from race to seeing the all in the equity definition. It is an opportunity for us to think about how can all of our institutions, our laws, our regulations, our customs, be refreshed– from what we have now to, a beautiful, vibrant, multiracial democracy where we all need to see each other’s humanity.” Michael emphasized a reality where all can participate and reach their full potential and has come to view compassionate systems as “nation building work.”

Speaker Larissa Duncan, Ph.D., Professor Child and Family Well-Being at The University of Wisconsin, echoed Michael’s sentiment about equity and re-prioritizing our humanness. As leader of a state-wide effort to enhance individual and family well-being, Larissa said “if we wish to re-engineer or first to reimagine this system, we must cultivate the skill to be with that suffering and that’s where the contemplative practices such as mindfulness, compassion, loving and kindness” come in. She highlighted that to reexamine the system in a truly liberatory way starts with each of us examining ourselves. Larissa ended the conversation asking, “What will give us the courage to act compassionately?” which is an important question we will continue to explore in future discussions.

“Population level data in support of well-being and compassionate systems change,” the next event in the series, will highlight the pioneering work in British Columbia to track the well-being of all children and state-wide change efforts in California. The webinar will be held on March 17, 2022, 11:00am — 12:30pm EST.

Featured guests include: Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, PhD, NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair of Social and Emotional Learning, University of Illinois — Chicago; Michael Funk, Director of the Expanded Learning Division (EXLD) for the California Department of Education; Tiffany Gipson, Program Director for the California AfterSchool Network; Ernesto Duran, Director of Region 8 Expanded Learning Services at Ventura County Office of Education; and Jennie Snyder, Deputy Superintendent, Instructional Services Division at Sonoma County Office of Education Santa Rosa, California.

A question of caring was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.