Heart-lead Leadership
Much talk and dialogue pertaining to human-centric systems have emerged in various disciplines, areas of thought and industry. One hears it from the mouth of architects, designers, engineers and also from people in education. To position the human being as central to his/her learning process has emerged in education circles for at least the last two decades as a sort of motto, a kind of slogan, particularly in International Education. The IB curriculum explicitly positions the knower as central to the learning process, so much so that the learner in many a situation is asked to demonstrate how he or she is central to his or her learning processes, how, for instance, the issue at hand in a TOK essay, should ideally and quite explicitly bring his ‘knower’s perspective’ to the fore. This also serves, interestingly and legitimately enough, in turn as a veritable assessment criteria. One can safely say that in the last half century, education has shown in most instances a central paradigm shift, ubiquitously. In India, particularly, where the voice of the teacher was that of a guru, of absolute authority, we now see many classrooms with teachers initiating exploration and learning from their own students, co-constructing knowledge, so to speak.
We are also at the beginning of an ostensible information era lead by the helping hand of digital technology that ought to lead us out–educere in Latin means to lead out–much like a shepard leads out his flock. With the aid of digital technology that is also evolving everyday, we are now able to create digital blueprints or rather imprints of our schools’ functionings. We have online schools, hybrid classrooms, asynchronous learning, an entire battery of robust educational equipment at out disposal. The head of school can easily open a given teacher’s Google classroom and see what this week’s lessons were, that if there were a natural calamity and even if the school would burn down, there would be a metaverse corrolary saved somewhere on a hard drive or on some cloud or other. Technology, now more so than ever has made it much easier to create systems whose main role is to communicate and though members of an educational community can easily peer into their colleagues classrooms in the luxury of their own homes, on their own time, even on their phones, technology alone does not do the communication for us, but is merely the latter’s instrument. There has been a veritable technocratic pestilence creeping into our schools that claims that in order to eat sufficiently a pot, alone ought to suffice, whereas good-old human communication over a cup of tea is not official enough and can not be witnessed in the same way, for it does not belong to a perfect system and due protocol.
As an educator, I have always given the utmost credence to building individuals that comprise a society. I call it heart-lead leadership where the primary goal of education is to engender joyful consciousness for the individuals and society that comprise a school community, the most fertile ground for learning. In order to achieve this, we must never forget that we are human beings and we don’t always fit perfectly into a system, that we have individual needs and wants and desires that need to be communicated and addressed in the most natural, perhaps even anthropologically primordial ways: by talking and eating and laughing and learning together, by communicating in the most natural and ancient way possible. The Google classroom may make certain processes easier, but in itself it does not communicate and in fact may even deter two teachers, for instance, working on the same unit meeting over a cup of tea to discuss a common project and getting to know each other personally. That is true human-centric education, a system ridden with anomalies and quirks just like the human being, himself. Perfect systems have their place but the human spirit is lead by the heart that cannot possibly be enclosed or adjusted to fit neatly.
Source
Anuradha Monga, Chair & Founder, The Association of International Schools in India (TAISI)
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