Young people throughout different cultures and circumstances are confronted with the complex contradictions of the interconnected, interdependent systems in our world (e.g. climate change, human migration, terrorism, substance use, etc.). An essential question for the future of education is how do we help students to reflect on, deeply understand and respond mindfully and compassionately rather than just feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of these systems. With the growing interest in education in social and emotional learning (SEL) and mindfulness today, we feel it is especially timely to show how these can combine with skills in understanding systems and complexity to establish a cognitive and affective foundation for global citizenship and what the International Baccalaureate (IB) network calls “International Mindedness.”

For over a year, this has been in focus for a diverse group of educators and researchers from the IB, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Penn State University. Out of this work, a series of prototypes across the K-12 spectrum have been started in 10 different countries (including European, African, Asian and North American sites) since 2017. These involve new models of thinking and teaching that combine contemplative SEL, systems thinking and compassion, and help teachers and students to apply these skills to important issues in their day to day realities.

Three Essential Components

The workshop will be organized around three essential components from a curricular standpoint:

1. Developing the skillsets of a systems thinker, through using a variety of systems thinking tools and practices, such as seeing deeper systemic structures underlying surface events, and how mental models and “artifacts” shape those structures.
2. But, even for skillful systems thinkers, complex issues can easily be seen as something outside of ourselves, or something we understand intellectually but not emotionally. “Systems sensing” skills help to “sense into” the multiple experienced realities in any complex setting.
3. Over time, these skills can combine to nurture a compassionate stance. One foundational skill lies in understanding the structural sources of problems that go beyond individual actors. In that sense, systemic understanding is beyond blame. Another lies in staying “next to that other” and feeling with them how they feel yet with less internalization of the other’s emotional state than can occur with empathy alone (and the consequent feelings of being overwhelmed or “emotionally high-jacked”) and yet also holding an intention for others’ well-being – which is why compassion is seen in many developmental traditions as a cultivated, refined state of being.

In this framework and training, we conceptualize compassion as an essentially systemic property of mind: to cultivate compassion is to be able to appreciate the systemic forces that influence people’s actions. It is the capacity to hold paradoxes – to see and sense the larger system with all its interdependence and interconnectedness and all the unintended consequences of human behavior – without judgment but with real care for the system and everyone involved in it.