Category Archives: April-June 2017

4/22 – Challenges of Transdisciplinary Collaboration: A Conceptual Literature Review

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

Sue L.T. McGregor

The focus of this paper was transdisciplinary collaboration and what is being said in the literature about the challenges of this aspect of transdisciplinarity work. A conceptual literature review revealed four conceptual threads: (a) managing group processes, (b) reflexivity, (c) common learning process, and (d) facilitating integration and synthesis. These challenges mirror the special qualities of transdisciplinary collaboration. Individual and collective diversities deeply affect communications and collaborations during transdisciplinary work. Those engaged in such work can benefit …

4/22 – An Integrative Vision: Worldcentric Guardians Using Integrative Dynamics in Our Current Crises

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

Gerard Bruitzman

Many of us understand that humanity is living amidst an unprecedented global meta-crisis, marked by many deep, complexly interrelated, and compounding local, national and global crises: educational, ecological, economic, health, moral, political, social, technological, et al.

We tend to respond with a mix of at least three ways to these crises. First, we tend to withdraw from the world’s complexity into more familiar, perhaps more comfortable places. Second, we tend to engage with the world’s complexity on …

4/22 – A New Approach to Dialog: Teaching the Dialectical Thought Form Framework – Part I: Foundations of Real-World Dialog

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

Otto Laske

If a simple epigram could sum up what is essential to thinking dialectically it should be that it is the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections. Its essence is fluidity structured around the hard core of the concept of absence and the 1M-4D relations it implicates. – Roy Bhaskar (1993, p. 190)

To my students

Abstract

Technologically driven culture change, impoverishment of undergraduate and graduate education due to a focus on obtaining employment, and the …

4/22 – A New Approach to Dialog: Teaching the Dialectical Thought Form Framework – Part II: Dialoging Tools of Dialectic

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

 Otto Laske

Part II: Dialoging Tools of Dialectic

Using a Short Table of Thought Forms

The reader now realizes that in order to understand the world around it, the thinking ego uses thought forms, and that grouped together thought forms make up a living, transformational system that increasingly develops over a person’s life time (“mind”).

Since the mind is a “system”, thought forms never exist in isolation; they are therefore always ready to be deepened, linked, and coordinated.…

4/22 – A New Approach to Dialog: Teaching the Dialectical Thought Form Framework – Part III: Teaching Programs for, and Applications of, Dialogical Dialectic

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

Otto Laske

 

Part III: Teaching Programs for, and Applications of, Dialogical Dialectic

How to Develop a Teaching Program for Dialectical Thinking

Teaching dialectical thinking in a world dominated by logical thinking is a task of tall order. There is apparently no place for such thinking in a world governed by algorithms and formal- logical models.

At the same time, re-vitalizing dialectical thinking is of great value just because it provides a broadening of perspectives, not only for professionals but for …