The Deep Dive Into Your Worldview is an exciting, transformative learning journey that invites students into an in-depth exploration of their worldviews – a personal and embodied exploration of how they relate to self, others, the world, and the future. This learning journey aims for the cultivation of worldview-awareness and transformative leadership skills.
The Deep Dive is currently being developed, tested, and researched in collaboration with three universities in the Netherlands, with financial support of EWUU, Triodos foundation, IONA Stichting and NatuurCollege.
This broad course touches on essential topics of interest to students wanting to play a role in addressing the great challenges of our time. It helps them strengthen their self-insight and self-care, while simultaneously increasing their understanding of and compassion for others. It also helps them step back and get a bigger perspective on our world, while solidifying their inner compass, clarifying their purpose, and developing their future visions.
This course doesn’t just offer vital knowledge, but scaffolds students to explore, apply, and leverage this knowledge for their personal growth and transformation. In this way they are supported, after Gandhi’s famous words, to become ‘the change they wish to see’, and embody the kind of leadership they deem necessary at this challenging time.
What will students learn?
This course facilitates students to systematically explore and evolve how they see and hold themselves in the world. We do this in four modules, which cultivate the ability to:
1) Be present, reflective, and aware of one’s biases; take perspective on one’s perspective;
2) Constructively relate to other perspectives, deeply listen, and empathize with others;
3) Make sense of our complex world, adapt one’s perspective, develop inner compass;
4) Clarify one’s values and purpose, and align one’s behaviors and habits with them.
The figure below gives an overview of these four modules.
In module 1 we explore our relationship to self, engaging questions like: How do I view and talk to myself? How do I know that what I believe is true? What are my biases and blind spots?
In module 2 we explore our relationship to others, engaging questions like: How do I view others? How do I understand the nature and plight of humanity? How can I collaborate better?
In module 3 we explore our relationship to the whole, engaging questions like: How do I relate to nature? What’s my role in the larger whole? What kind of leadership is needed right now?
In module 4 we explore our relationship to the future, engaging questions like: What are my values and purpose? What future do I envision? What’s the next step in my journey?
Why the Deep Dive?
This course has been developed from the observation that the young people of today – our future leaders and change makers – receive little support to thrive in the complex, uncertain, existentially threatened, and socially explosive world in which they will soon be working.
Higher Education Institutions are still predominantly focused on the transfer of knowledge and cognitive skills, and their teaching is generally based in a transmissive pedagogy. But leadership demands so much more from people, especially in our age of systemic crisis!
The soft skills have become the new hard skills.
Think of the ability to listen and include other perspectives; to reflect on oneself and constructively deal with feedback; to regulate emotions, strategize, and self-direct; to engage in collaborations and resolve conflicts; to know oneself as part of a greater whole and shape one’s aspirations from there.
Students also increasingly ask for this! They long for self-reflection and value-exploration, for meaningful exchange and an expansion of perspectives, for good sense-making and a solid inner compass, for clarity on their purposes and supportive habits to actualize them.
To navigate the complexities of life in these troubled times, and enact transformative change, students need greater awareness of how they make meaning of, and thereby shape, their experience and world. They also need to cultivate transformative leadership skills.
This course sets students on a path to start developing both.