NEW PARADIGM EDUCATION

New Paradigm Education takes into account not only learning dynamics that address knowledge acquisition and skill competencies, but also learning to be as well as learning to be together; what is also known as learning for conviviality. This inquiry covers research orientations from social and emotional learning to somatic, kinesthetic and collective learning dynamics.

SYSTEMIC AND HOLISTIC LEARNING

The area of Systemic and Holistic Learning approaches considers trends and conceptions that promote multicultural, transdisciplinary and immersive learning rather than the standard teaching of traditional materials in classroom settings. Research includes curriculum-development and the practical application of emerging conceptions in beyond-the-school real-world settings.   

EVOLUTIONARY LEARNING COMMUNITIES / ECOSYSTEMS

Evolutionary Learning Communities learn how to learn in harmony with the dynamics of their evolving environment.  When two or more such communities embark on a shared learning path for the joint creation of meaning, an Evolutionary Learning Ecosystem emerges.  The collective intelligence harnessed in such engagements offers new horizons for individual and collective learning dynamics.  Approaches and methodologies that foster the emergence of these systems of collective learning form the focus of this research area.

Current Research Projects

Developing a Language Alter Ego: A Systemic and Holistic Approach to Multilingual and Multicultural Learning.

Research Project
By Ekaterina Matveeva, Ph.D. (h.c.)

1. Summary of Objectives and Expected Outcomes

The core objective of this research is to explore the concept of Language Alter Ego (LAE) within a systemic and holistic learning framework.

Language Alter Ego (LAE) is a voluntarily or involuntarily created linguistic personality based on a newly generated behaviour appropriate for a particular socio-cultural environment. It reflects the profound adaptability of humans in multilingual and multicultural environments, showcasing the depth and complexity of cross-cultural and linguistic integration. (Matveeva, 2015, 2022, 2024).

Unlike merely acquiring vocabulary and grammar, LAE reflects a transformation in emotional expression, social behavior, and cognitive frameworks, adapting to the cultural norms and values embedded in the language. Rooted in psycholinguistics, cross-cultural psychology, and Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, LAE connects systemic and holistic learning approaches with personality and identity development. Evidence for LAE is seen in across the studies on multilingual individuals who demonstrate shifts in personality, emotional repertoire, and social interaction aligned with the languages they use (Dewaele, 2017; Pavlenko, 2005; Wierzbicka, 1999). While existing studies explore multilingual personality shifts, few have provided a structured framework like the 14 building blocks to systematically develop these dimensions in learners. This dynamic model provides a framework for understanding how learning a language extends beyond communication to reshape personality, identity, and expand cultural empathy, offering a new lens for language education that fosters personal and intercultural growth.

By investigating how emotional, social, cognitive, cultural and other dimensions intersect during the language learning process, the research aims to develop and implement a transdisciplinary curriculum that fosters the development of the LAE among learners.

Expected outcomes include:

• The validation of the identified components of LAE and its development stages, and identification of any additional components.
• Development of advanced methodologies to improve language acquisition, focusing on emotional, cultural and psychological aspects.
• Implementation of a comprehensive curriculum that enhances learners’ linguistic, emotional, and cultural competencies in multilingual settings.

2. Research Hypothesis and Guiding Questions

The research is driven by the hypothesis that the Language Alter Ego begins to develop at the A2 level (based on the CEFR framework), particularly in systemic and holistic learning Zenvironments. The guiding questions are:

• How do systemic and holistic approaches impact the development of the components of the LAE?
• What specific activities effectively promote the growth of each LAE component?
• What real-world applications can be derived from the development of LAE for intercultural communication and language learning?

The hypothesis further posits that these approaches accelerate the language learning process by improving emotional intelligence and fostering deeper linguistic and cultural fluency.

3. Major Theoretical Framework

This work adheres to a systemic and holistic approach to learning, integrating theories from various disciplines such as:

• Cultural and emotional scripts (Goddard, Wierzbicka, Dewaele) that suggest language shapes cultural and emotional perspectives.
• Multiple intelligences (Gardner) and their relevance in language and intercultural communication.
• Second language acquisition and psycholinguistics (Boroditsky, Pavlenko, Matsumoto, Norton, Whorf) which support the notion that emotions, personality and identity are influenced by language learning.

The study embraces a transdisciplinary framework, connecting cognitive science, cross-cultural psychology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics to provide a comprehensive understanding of LAE development.

4. Selected Research Methodology

A mixed-methods approach will be employed, combining both qualitative and quantitative methods:
Participants: The study will focus on multilingual individuals who have spoken a foreign language for at least five years and lived in a target language country for one year or more.

Data Collection:

• Surveys and Questionnaires: Assess the development of each LAE component and experiences in holistic learning environments.
• Psychometric Assessments: Measure personality traits, emotional intelligence, and cultural awareness.
• Interviews and Focus Groups: Provide in-depth insights into participants’ perceptions of their LAE(s).
• Pre- and Post-Tests: Evaluate changes in linguistic and cultural competencies.
• Neuroscientific Methods like fMRI and EEG to observe brain activity during language switching (If budget permits).

5. Potential Impact and Implications for Further Research

The potential impact of this research includes:

• Educational Practice: It will offer educators a framework for integrating systemic and holistic approaches to foster LAE development, thus enhancing language learning strategies.
• Curriculum Development: The research will contribute to the creation of immersive and culturally informed learning environments, aligning with global trends in education.

Policy Making: It will provide evidence-based recommendations to promote systemic and holistic learning in multilingual and multicultural education.

The implications for further research include:

• Longitudinal Studies: To observe long-term effects of LAE on language learning and intercultural competence.
• Cross-Cultural Comparisons: Understanding how different educational systems impact LAE development across cultures.
• Interdisciplinary Research: Further exploration into intersections between psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and cross-cultural psychology.

This proposal seeks to push the boundaries of language education and support the development of global communicators through innovative, emotionally intelligent approaches to learning.

6. Supplementary materials for the context

• Matveeva. E., (2024) Unlocking Language Alter Ego: Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Pathways to Polyglot Mastery.
  Kindle Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJRG2LJQ
• Matveeva. E., (2024) Fostering Language Alter Ego: A Teacher’s Guide to Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Pathways in Language Learning. Kindle Amazon
  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D34Z8BD4?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk
• Matveeva. E., (upcoming) Language Alter Ego: Multilingualism, Personality, Identity, and Emotional Expression Across Cultures, Polonia Journal, No 20, ISSN 2083-3121
• Matveeva. E., (2024) Language Alter Ego building blocks
  https://ekaterinamatveeva.com/tpost/7iax041no1-14-building-blocks-of-language-alter-ego
• Matveeva. E., (2022) Where Astrophysics Meets Linguistics. Planetarium Nomads BA Conference, Argentina
  https://www.youtube.com/live/3c6Uup22adY?feature=share&t=5538
• Matveeva. E., (2020) Auybowan, Multilingual is normal, p.123-126, Hamilton. K., Kindle Amazon
• Matveeva. E., (2019) Buenos Aires de Idiomas Extranjeros. Cómo aprender un idioma rápido y ser feliz, Autores de Argentina Publishing
• Matveeva, E., (2017) Universal aspects of cross-linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference, Art and Literature Scientific and Analytical Journal, TEXTS 3.2017, ISSN 2294-8902
• Matveeva, E., (2016) Language Alter Ego – The key to multicultural linguistic personalities, Philology Journal, issue No 4 (4), July, ISSN 2414-4452
• Matveeva, E., (2016) Language Alter Ego. TEDx University of St Andrews, Scotland
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2vhnd2M7A
• Matveeva, E., (2016) Language Alter Ego — myth or reality? The concept based on the studies of the linguistic personality and the relations of power, Art and Literature Scientific and Analytical Journal, TEXTS, issue TEXTS 2.2015, ISSN 2294-8902
• Matveeva. E., (2016) Polyglot of your own will (in Russian), Animedia Publishing, Czech Republic
• Matveeva, E., (2015) The concept of culture in the language learning process: Secondary Linguistic Personality, Art and Literature Scientific and Analytical Journal, TEXTS, issue TEXTS 2.2015, ISSN
  2294-8902

Complexity Patterning Curriculum for Transformational Education

Research Project
By Dr Shae L Brown

How can Complexity Patterning based learning be made broadly available for educators and students?

Does this pattern-based curriculum help teachers and students to learn the knowledge and skills of complexity competence?

These questions encompass the curriculum design process, implementation with
educators and students, and subsequent evaluation.

2. Primary focus

This research project is focused on the educational curriculum design required for the teaching and learning of relational complexity competence. Such competence includes perceiving, thinking with, embodied knowing, and acting through an understanding of complex phenomena as co-generative and participatory.
A pattern-based design, called Complexity Patterning has been implemented successfully by the researcher with secondary and university students. This project aims to explore effective design of curriculum for broad availability and implementation with educators and students. Currently western education and teacher training is operating within the outdated mechanistic paradigm.
A Complexity Patterning curriculum will be designed within the deep complexity paradigm, which includes intertwinglement that is transcontextual as well as transtemporal, and also indeterminacy, non-linearity and co-generative emergence. The aim is to integrate learning and becoming, and attune students’ sentience to the generative and relational patterning of the world’s coming-into-being.
Complexity competence supports collective human learning, and learning with the wider world. This is educational design that aims to contribute in a practical way to transformational education for thrivable futures.

3. Research process

The process of this research includes the following steps:

• Investigate the learning frameworks for teacher education and high school student education. This step will include frameworks for alternative education such as the Living School in Australia, as well as in the government school system. Literature that defines the new paradigm education required for thrivable futures will also be explored and utilised.
• Refine the relationship of this work to the latest understanding of learning as a function of the evolution of both people and the cosmos.
• Design of curriculum for teacher training. This step will include teaching and learning materials, curation of readings and viewing material, and if possible, the generation of animated videos to support understanding.
• Design of curriculum for secondary students. This curriculum will be aimed at years 7 & 8, for students 13 and 14 years of age. It will be easily adaptable for students of different ages. As above, this will include a range of teaching and learning materials.
• Educational sites will be sought to implement the curriculum. The Living School is one possibility, and higher education providers with an interest in innovation and complexity thinking and understanding will be explored.
• Evaluation will be designed into the research process, through reflective practice and regular reporting. Students and educators will be invited to provide feedback on their experience of the curriculum, and their patterning artefacts will be recorded as visual data.

4. Potential impact and implications for further research

This project has the potential to be a trim tab for education systems, and/or provide innovative deep complexity based education for alternative education.
A complexity Patterning curriculum can contribute to the knowledge and understanding required to help young people participate in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environments and situations of today and tomorrow that require a response to the RUPT conditions of rapid and unpredictable change, that are paradoxical and tangled. It can also provide an approach to participatory deep complexity that includes human capacities of co-generativity and agency attuned to the thriving of life.
More broadly this work has the capacity to contribute to integrated learning and becoming that supports the evolutionary emergence of future humans.

Kurdistan Region Iraq (KRI) Teacher Up-Take of Student-Centered and/or Flipped Classroom Approach

LINPR Research Project Summary
By Jessica Ashe
17 October 2022

1. Guiding questions

What types of internal barriers exist towards teachers adopting a student-centered and/or flipped classroom approach to learning?

Do our interventions help teachers to adopt a student-centered and/or flipped classroom approach to learning?

2. Primary focus

This study into the educational culture of Kurdistan will elucidate why teachers hesitate to enact this actual long-standing practice of a learner-centered classroom. We will seek to expand the flipped classroom to consider the entirety of the learning ecosystem, including the whole student, and the whole teacher as in the yogic tradition. In that context, reflecting on what empowers these people is not only an interesting concept, but one that could in fact impact change here.

The gradual approach improves upon our framework due to its inclusion of managing the community response. Indeed, the flipped classroom in and of itself is not new. The question here is why is it so slow to be adopted in developing nations, using Kurdistan as an example. A quote from a participant MD in one of my online sessions in Iraq with a medical school seems pertinent here. After I showed him all of the recent research from top-tier medical schools in the US and UK that demonstrated student-centered problem solving, this medical doctor angrily said, “The research shows that I should lecture!” The comment and tone suggest a medical doctor had nothing to learn from a doctor of education and a staunch refusal to uptake.

3. Research process

To achieve the aims of the study the following procedures will be followed:

A semi-structured interview will be prepared to interview the samples of the study.

Teachers will be interviewed prior to the treatment of training in the student-centered / flipped classroom methods to ascertain their ideas, preconceptions and biases towards these methods.

Teachers will undergo training, during which they will be observed (participant observer). The training will include face-to-face and online sessions on the concept of flipped classroom approach, the procedures, the challenges and strategies for better implementation in Kurdistan region context. They will be given assignments to prepare lesson plans and video-tape certain lessons adopting flipped classroom approach.

Teachers will be interviewed after the training to ascertain any potential changes in their understanding, previous preconceptions and biases of the student-centered / flipped classroom methods (model).

4. Potential impact and implications for further research

Despite the established knowledge of the increased efficacy of the student-centered / flipped classroom methods, schools and universities in Iraq fail to implement them. Previous research has established that the #1 hindrance to ‘take-up’ of these methods is teacher identity. We expect to learn what aspects of identity prevent teachers from using more effective methods of teaching. We also expect to have found ways to adapt teacher self-identity such that these more effective methods actually take hold in education. When previously established best-in-practice methods are used, we expect the educational system in Iraq to improve.

Deep Education for Human Security and Flourishing for the 21 st century

Research Proposal
Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research, Domain of NEW PARADIGM EDUCATION
https://thelaszloinstitute.com/research-areas/research-program/new-paradigm-education/ 

Line of Research
New Paradigm Education – identifying the essential transdisciplinary knowledge, understanding, and skill competencies necessary for a systemic and holistic in-community response to the challenges of the 21st century. 

Research Lead
Dr. Elena Mustakova, open project
(Proposed Research Team: Dr. Scott Alan Carlin, David Lorimer, Dr. Nina Meyerhof, Dr. Kurt Johnson)

September 2024

Research Proposal

1. Summary of objectives and expected outcomes

We are living amidst rapid global transformation, for which most people lack understanding. In the absence of systemic understanding of processes at work, we are seeing the deepening social fracturing impact of an information warfare blitzkrieg, intentionally conceived and spreading rapidly in what used to be known as the democratic world. Current discipline-based education lacks the holistic framework to pull together different worldviews into an integral understanding which equips students with a grounded approach to the cross-disciplinary, cross-domain, cross-cultural, challenges of the 21st century.

This research project seeks to identify and develop those areas of trans- and meta-  disciplinary expertise and instructional pedagogy that can counteract the deepening and manipulated polarization of worldviews in a world devoid of meaning, in which “all signs are ‘emptied of sense’ ”, and can equip young people and ordinary citizens for the integral solutions needed in personal, public, and professional life to address the current planetary crisis with the skills necessary to participate in an emerging planetary community (Pomerantsev, p. 193).

2. Research hypothesis or guiding questions to be addressed

The guiding question would be, What may sustainable planetary citizenship look like, and how may it be expressed on the local and national levels? What would need to be the ingredients of transdisciplinary education that prepares people for effective planetary citizenship?

We hypothesize that the foundation of such education would have to be an understanding of the nature of consciousness, and the interdependence of its internal and external manifestations and evolution, both individually and collectively. That is likely to involve developing an evolutionary and cross-cultural approach to public health, human-environmental history, sociology, political science and spiritual studies. It is also likely to require the development of mature critical moral consciousness which would allow people to discern between veiled ideologies and manipulated worldviews and genuine systemic solutions, and to recognize the links between human health, culture, ecology, moral development, language, and planetary health.

3. Major theoretical framework to which your work adheres

The research will be guided by an integral theoretical perspective as developed by Ken Wilber and Ervin Laszlo. It will also be informed by the Spiral Dynamics work of Clare Graves, Don Beck, and Chris Cowan, which will allow us to explore how different evolutionary worldviews can be effectively approached. The culturally sensitive integral development approach of Alexander Schieffer will be an important resource. The research will also draw on inter-spiritual perspectives, amidst which the integral perspective of the Bahá’í offers a significant example of a global approach.

4. Selected research methodology

Extensive transdisciplinary review of literature and relevant global initiatives; qualitative research, participatory action research involving the development, teaching, and elaboration of modules.

5. Potential impact and implications for further research

The clear articulation of the essential modules of deep transdisciplinary education for human security and flourishing would become a ready resource, drawing from which program offerings can be developed for different populations and cultural contexts. The project would articulate an axis of orientation – how the individual can live with power, purpose, and love in the world that is emerging, amidst the cultural impasse and political and intellectual polarization, in which individuals flounder.

Such an articulation would serve as a foundation for outreach to various educational, corporate, public, political and other entities.

Essentially, we view this project as laying the foundation for Unitive Justice as discussed in sdgthoughtleaderscircle.org/unitive-justice-and-global-security-circle

6. Supplementary Materials

Mustakova, E., (2023). A Heart-Mind Path Toward Unitive Justice and Human
Security. In Laszlo & Lorimer (Eds.), The Great Upshift.

Mustakova, E., M. Casey & A. Gaston (2023). Building Bridges Toward Unitive
Healing. In Kintzelman & Robinson (Eds.), The Holomovement: Embracing Our Collective
Purpose to Unite Humanity.

Mustakova, E., (2022). The Bahá’u’lláh Impulse. In Paradigm Explorer, 2022/2, The
Scientific & Medical Network.

Mustakova, E. (2021). Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and
Collective Transformation. New York, NY: Light On Light Press.

Mustakova, E. (2020). Living in the Presence of the Ancient Beauty. In Winslow, R. &
C. Lee (Eds.). Deep Beauty. Norwalk, CT: Woodhall Press.

Pomerantsev, P. (2019). This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War
Against Reality. London: Faber & Faber LTD.

Other Initiative

CommUnity PROJECT

CommUnity is a project of the Laszlo Institute that utilizes a vision of educational innovation to empower learning communities.

It does this by harnessing the power of collective intelligence to provide creative solutions to common needs and opportunities in diverse learning environments.

The learning communities of CommUnity engage in co-creation and prototyping practical solutions through a process that embodies individual and collective well-being sourced from empathy and joy. It is focused on, and is being developed by, young people from around the world.

More information on the current focus of the project to gain funding and support can be found here:
www.oneyoungworld.com/lead2030/21-22/challenge-sdg4-deloitte