This is an invitation to join The Grove's societal transformation lab (STL) hub for an experimental 4-D mapping exploration into transformative learning and decolonising our minds.

What is Societal Transformation Lab?

U.Lab Societal Transformation Labs is a multi-location lab coordinated by The Presenting Institute at MIT. These labs are running in over 300 location across the world from Feb-June 2019 using a range of innovative methods such as Theory U, social field research and social presenting theatre.

Our hub in Sydney is being hosted by The Grove and is exploring transformational learning and change.

What is 4-D Mapping?

• a collective sense-making approach to make visible the reality in a social system

• create a human sculpture of the system (also called social presencing theatre).

• Each actor (10-12 people) plays a role in the system

• There are 2 roles always present in any system (the earth & the future)

Key Themes:

- Education is still targeted at the industrial era and is killing kid's creativity and some kids needing to be medicated just to 'conform'

- Our colonial inheritance in Australia and systemic issues that reinforce white privilege and disadvantage indigenous Australians

A Metaphor

“Education is like a production line churning using standardisation and dollar cost as metrics to churn out kids adjusted to industrial era thinking.”

Perhaps one of the biggest impacts of colonisation is the colonisation of our consciousness?

…Get educated to get a good job, to get money, to buy a house, to live in a nuclear family, to be isolated, to be self-sufficient, to consume….

How many of my assumptions about what it is to be a human being in contemporary culture have been conditioned (colonised) in my consciousness from a very young age?

When we sense this from my place fundamental human 'beingness', this starts to feel like a betrayal of my human spirit. Yet it is so ubiquitous and so little examined as to feel almost invisible.

How do I/we reveal this colonisation of our minds (collective story), or another way of saying it is to make the invisible more visible?
What might the sculpture reveal about the colonisation of consciousness and how we might decolonise individually and collectively?

We would love you or any friends who may be interested to join us in this exploration.