Lukas Herrmann

Facilitator and PhD Student
Empathie macht Schule

Germany Hub | EUROPE

Lukas Herrmann is a facilitator and PhD student at Heidelberg University, Germany.

In his PhD, Lukas focuses on the cultivation of generative social fields. His work is anchored in the “Empathie macht Schule” project in Berlin, Germany. This long-term whole-school training and co-creation program targets 3 elementary schools with over 1,000 students. The training addresses the whole school staff (180 pedagogues, teachers, school leaders) to develop their relational competence, compassion, and mindfulness.

With this research focus, Lukas seeks to understand how organizations and schools can become compassionate holding spaces for the future, based on a lived respect for the dignity of children and adults alike. Lukas adopts a “social fields perspective,” integrating multiple perspectives (school leaders, teachers, children) and methodologies (microphenomenology and systems thinking) to shed light on the lived experience of the relational metamorphoses taking place over the course of the training program.

As a facilitator, Lukas is passionate about bringing together mind, heart, and guts, and illuminate and utilize the often unnoticed intertwinement between what’s inside, between, and around us. His intention is to help meet the challenges on all those levels with the depth of compassion and presence that is available to us – and see them as opportunities to grow personal, social and global responsibility.

Lukas worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Neuroscience, and published on the contemplative training of perspective-taking and empathy. He studied psychology in Freiburg and Berlin (Humboldt University), Germany, and is a trained family therapist.