Apply Presentation International Positive Psychology Association 7th IPPA World Congress 2021

A Collective Leadership Journey Toward Healing-Centred Education (#79)

Joanne Alford 1 , Ash Buchanan 1
  1. Berry Street School, Noble Park, VIC, Australia

There is growing recognition amongst educators of the importance of moving towards healing-centred practice. In this session, we share the ongoing story of the Berry St School, a trauma-informed education setting in Victoria, Australia, who are on a collective leadership journey to examine their assumptions and paradigms of thought, so they can transform their capacity to be a source of wellbeing and healing for everyone in their community. The collective leadership journey is grounded in the practice of Theory U and could be described as being awareness-based (i.e. building the schools capacity for deep listening and collective mindfulness). It is transformative (i.e. shifting the schools underlying mindsets and paradigms of thought). It is action-research based (i.e. empowering everyone to generate and respond to contextually relevant research). It is healing-centred (i.e. activating the school’s innate self-healing response). And it is emergent (i.e. leading from the emerging future, as opposed to being driven by the past). Attendees of this session will hear what happened and will learn how they can host a collective leadership journey at their school.

  1. Scharmer, C. O. (2009). Theory U: Learning from the future as it emerges. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
  2. Acosta, A. (2020). In Pursuit of Healing-Centred Education (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-a7a8-an96/download
  3. Alford, J., & Buchanan, A. (2020). Action research results including generative scribing images, core questions, empathy interviews, metaphors, emotions, and warm data. (Action research project, Berry St School).
  • Keywords: Education, Leadership/Management, Mindfulness, Relationships, Systems
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