Learning to catalyse socio-ecological change: reflective practice experiments

Embodied thinking is a very important platform for people working to catalyse socio-ecological change. Complexity and uncertainty, and the need for ongoing adaptation and innovation, are key reasons for this. In the postgraduate course I am reflecting on in this chapter, I taught students six practices that provide them with a platform for working as socio-ecological intrapreneurs: systems analysis, stakeholder analysis, management system analysis and design, creative thinking, negotiation, and reflective practice. These are skills that need to be learned by doing, so a major component of the course was reflective practice experiments that students designed themselves to develop their skills. They carried out felt sense-centred reflective practice experiments (using exploratory practice, move testing, and/or hypothesis testing) in a setting of their choice outside the classroom: their workplace, household, another course, or some personal activity. Development of felt-sensing skills was widely demonstrated, and this was emancipating: increasing flexibility, insight, and creativity. Working on concrete problems - negotiating better environmental practices, contributing to biodiversity conservation, household dynamics - made the benefits of embodied thinking, with its sensitivity to the distance between concrete actuality and our ways of thinking about it (cf. Whitehead and phenomenology) - vivid for many students; they embodied embodied thinking.