Visualising Positive Change #1

Here are some reflections on September’s Visualising Positive Change workshops, part of a 3-day Human Interaction conference at Atlantic College in Wales (an event organised for first year students). Guest speakers and facilitators included Miles Harrison, Selena Sermerno, John White, Dan Anthony, Cheil Mooj, Jan Eichhorn and John White.

Mindful Maps also visualised Alex Fradera’s keynote session: Leadership in Networked and Fluid Times.

Atlantic College in St Donat’s, Wales, is The founding college of a global education movement. UWC Atlantic College is an international residential school. Each year, 350 students aged 16 – 18 from 80 different countries benefit from a world-class International Baccalaureate educational experience. UWC Atlantic College is committed to making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.

Mindful Maps facilitated a mind-mapping workshop which I call Visualising Positive Change. This workshop is partly inspired by and similar to a collage technique designed by Hannah Lewis called Visualising Transition. Using simple drawing and mind mapping techniques, we can visualising and navigate the changes we would like to make, in our own lives and out in the world.

“Why might we want to visualise positive change” I hear you cry, and how does this link to the conference theme of Human Interaction? Here are some visual thoughts.

We all have the power to change things, change of any kind requires some kind of interaction whether that is with yourself, other people and/or the environment around you (it might require all three). Change can be big and exciting/scary or very small and subtle. Both can be equally powerful! To manifest it’s power, change needs a dialogue whether that is inner or outer (or both). However, verbal dialogue alone can be easily lost or forgotten, which is why Mindful Maps creates physical artifacts, as an aid to memory, a tangible statement of intent, a first step to change and to enhance learning (A massive 80% of what we learn is visual!).

The themes the students chose to visualise were diverse, for example: being less reliant of caffeine, the college running on renewable energy and dispelling racial stereotypes. Here are some examples from the students:

If this process works well with young people (16-18 in this case), I question how similar approaches might be used in educations for things like study planning, outlining coursework and working in groups?

This post is first in a series of Visualising Positive Change journal entries. Next up is Visualising Change #2: Organic, Systemic, or both?

Comments and your thoughts on visualising positive change are welcome, join the conversation!

Quote of the day: Small is Beautiful

Mindful Maps is currently inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Here are some word’s I’d like to share (more of an extract than a quote!):

“When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere division. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. ‘Well I don’t know’, you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or shall we say, a tool box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange land without any signs of civilisation, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind.”

- Schumacher, E.F. (1973), P68-69. This edition printed 1974 by Sphere Books Ltd, UK.