In June, Wilmette Institute welcomed faculty members, teaching assistants, and collaborators from across the U.S. and Canada to Louhelen Bahá’í School for its first in-person Faculty Development Seminar. More than an opportunity to review teaching methods, we explored what it means to cultivate transformative education – education that is attentive to both individual and collective growth.
At the heart of the seminar, participants explored the Baha’i Framework for Collective Learning, whose elements were articulated by the Baha’i International Development Organization in 2023 and form the bedrock of Wilmette Institute’s Social Transformation Certificate Program. Specifically, participants considered how the principles of social flourishing – such as the oneness of humanity, justice, and universal participation – provide guidance for how to systematically analyze local issues and challenges and how, through an iterative process of action-reflection, these principles apply to local circumstances. The Framework principles also provide scaffolding for curriculum and course development, moving away from content-based and transactional educational practices.
With our commitment to “revitalizing relationships” through education in mind, care and attention were given to creating a spiritually uplifting and empowering learning environment. Towards this end, at the seminar’s opening, participants were invited to share items that represented a meaningful, transformative element of their learning process. As artifacts and stories were shared, an understanding arose of the diversity and richness of the learning process and the ways in which participants had learned from and been transformed by particular relationships and experiences. Throughout the three days, through successive ice-breakers, outdoor activities, shared musical and artistic experiences, an environment of trust, joy, curiosity, and collective exploration took hold – modeling the environments WI faculty strive to create in our educational endeavors.
Exploring a Transformative Pedagogy
Throughout our time together, we explored concepts that give rise to Wilmete Institute’s distinctive and evolving pedagogy– among these: the two-fold moral purpose, which refers to the continuous interaction between the spiritual development of the individual and active contribution to the betterment of society; multiple ways of knowing and being (onto-epistemology), which recognizes the rich diversity of ways in which people and communities view, experience, and behave in the world; bridging theory and practice through community engagement; and principle-based course design. We spent significant time exploring the central aim of WI’s certificate program: building students’ capacity to contribute to prevalent discourses about social change. After reading about the nature of discourse contributions, participants identified the knowledge, skills, spiritual qualities, and attitudes essential to making such contributions effectively, and how curriculum design and teaching strategies can support students in developing them. On the final day of the seminar, participants had the opportunity to conduct an in-depth review of two courses in WI’s Social Transformation Certificate program to understand how curricular elements worked together to support student learning and to explore the rationale for content selection.
The Seminar – which included two Zoom sessions in addition to the in-person seminar – represented an important step in the evolution of WI’s efforts to develop a coherent and transformative pedagogy, capable of meaningfully engaging undergraduate and graduate students with a view to helping them see themselves as thoughtful protagonists of social change in their own lives and in the broader community. Rooted in an orientation towards continuous learning, WI looks forward to developing its pedagogy and faculty development program together with a growing body of collaborators across diverse disciplines, communities, and partner universities.
