“Equity, Child and Family Wellbeing, and Healthy Societies”

February 17, 2022, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EST

Speakers

Michael McAfee, Ph.D., President and CEO of PolicyLink

Larissa Duncan, Ph.D., Faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds, Elizabeth C. Davies Chair in Child & Family Well-Being, Director of the Center for Child and Family Well-Being, and Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Peter Senge, Ph.D, Senior Lecturer, MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab; Co-Founder, Center for Systems Awareness

Mette Boell, Ph.D, Visiting Scientist, MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab; Co-Founder and Executive Director, Center for Systems Awareness

Conversation Series Moderated by:

Diana Chapman Walsh, Ph.D., Former president, Wellesley College; Life Member Emerita, MIT Corporation.

Watch the recording and sign up to be notified of future events in the series.

About the Systems Awareness in Education: A MIT Conversation Series

We invite you to join us in a series of virtual conversations on compassionate systems change in education launching on January 13, 2022, hosted by MIT Open Learning, MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, and MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing.

​​We believe that education can be a leading sector in helping shape the cultural changes needed throughout society and that education innovators around the world are busy doing just that. This new conversation series will bring researchers, educators and practitioners together to explore work in student and educator wellbeing, classroom practice, and collaborative leadership at the district, region, state and international levels. Discussions will focus on the most pressing issues of our time, from climate change and equity to declining mental health and well-being.

Some key questions and themes we will explore in this series are:

• How can we better understand profound change processes that can shift underlying mental models and institutional structures at multiple levels in education? Without trivializing or over-simplifying, how can we foster a sense of confidence that real systems change is possible?

• How can busy educators and practitioners caught in the frenzy of everyday work and the challenges of our COVID-19 reality learn to pause, wonder, and explore how to get beyond our habitual quick-fix approaches as a substitute for deeper change? How do we develop more coherent strategies for creating the social and institutional conditions for larger scale and longer-term change?

• How can we support a gradual re-orientation to seeing education, and especially pK-12 education, as a critical locus for societal innovation?

Join us for this important and timely conversation series as we explore how we understand, enable and measure system change in the making within education. Our hope is that the conversations will be helpful to educators, school leaders, teacher leaders, researchers, and anyone interested in deep change in education.

Upcoming in the Series

“Population level data in support of well-being and compassionate systems change”

March 17, 2022, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EST

Speakers

Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, Ph.D., NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair of Social and Emotional Learning, University of Illinois - Chicago

Representatives from the California Department of Education

“Warm Data”: How to study personal and inter-personal change as foundational for systems change toward climate action”

April 21, 2022, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EST

Speakers

Mark Greenberg, Ph.D., Emeritus Edna Peterson Bennett Endowed Chair in Prevention Research and Professor of Human Development and Psychology, Founding Director of The Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development.

Gustav Böll, Youth Coach, Center for Systems Awareness

Youth Ambassadors: K-12 student representatives participating in a Compassionate Climate Learning Community

Missed the first in our series?

Watch the recording of "What Do We Mean By Systems Change and Why Is It So Difficult In Education?” from January 13, 2022 featuring Eric Klopfer, Peter Senge, and Mette Boell.

This event series is made possible through the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.