Integral Education: New Directions for Higher Learning

Grounding Integral Theory in the Field of Experience

Grounding Integral Theory in the Field of Experience Terri O’Fallon Introduction Inspired by the promise and potential of being able to make a difference that matters in a world full of suffering, Pacific Integral was born out of the commitment of four entrepreneurs to pursue a path of discovery. Pacific Integral is a privately run educational program for professionals interested in leadership development from a variety of backgrounds, focusing on applying integral theories as informed by our lived experience. This chapter will describe some key aspects of the learning process from our seven-year experiment. I will briefly outline how we developed our educational program, and how this experience enabled us to develop our understanding of Integral Theory. I will then describe how our experiences and research in both of these areas spawned new insights into the relationship between state/awareness stages, the structural/adult development stages, and behavior along with the models generated from these insights. This brief chapter focuses on how this model was developed within an integral educational context. However, in the conclusion I discuss three elements of our integrated educational context, which have contributed to accelerated developmental growth both vertically and horizontally . It is my hope that by sharing our discoveries with other educators we can support the ongoing effort to design new learning communities, which support human growth and development in unprecedented ways. Developing Integral Services Our first attempts to teach students to apply Integral Theory in practical ways were easier said than done. The first step on such a path is often to teach the 185 186 Terri O’Fallon work didactically and/or cognitively without much of an experiential or applied component. This often follows from an assumption that students can simply go out and skillfully apply a theory once they have intellectually understood it. We aimed to avoid this pitfall with the Generating Transformative Change program we developed. The curriculum was envisioned from initial experimentation using the AQAL model of Integral Theory (Wilber, 2006), in addition to other well-respected work in the field included Kegan and Lahey’s Seven Languages of Transformation (2001), Adaptive Leadership propounded by Heifetz (1994, 2002), Developmental Action Inquiry by Bill Torbert (2004), and Spiral Dynamics with Beck and Cowan (1996). The focus of our design for the 18-month long program was to engage participants in actual experiences of applying integral elements to their work and their lives, with six intensives lasting five days where participants received initial supervised practice and inter-sessions where they would apply these practices to their daily lives, returning to the next intensive for a deeper layer of learning. From this, a mode of continual adaptation and re-envisioning became a way of life very early on in the development of our services as we began our attempt to answer for ourselves, “What really is the embodiment of Integral Theory, and what is our particular expression of it?” Applied Research in the Field It became apparent that our co-learning would be far more potent if we had a keener understanding of the effectiveness of our program and if we could document change in our participants. Thus, we decided it was important to deepen our understanding of developmental levels in adults and began using Susanne Cook-Greuter’s (2002) Leadership Development Framework (LDF) assessment process. This inventory documents nine adult levels of maturity, from earliest to latest: Impulsive, Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, Strategist , Construct Aware, and Unitive. Applying these inventories to our population, which included every participant that came into our program as well as the faculty, helped us understand adult developmental maturity in ourselves, our participants, and ultimately of each cohort’s collective general level. This proved to be one of the greatest revelations of our dynamic experiment. Robert Kegan (1994) asserts that generally people do not move more than one stage in less than two to five years, yet we are finding that a one- or two-stage change is a common occurrence for those who have completed our 18-month program.1 This research has been invaluable in our understanding of program development, and our own embodied understanding of what people typify when they score at any one of these nine levels on this scale. 187 Grounding Integral Theory in the Field of Experience Learning from the Research The initial scores immediately helped us become aware of how inadequate we were...