BAS5515 · Facilitating systemic change

Overview

Systemic change needs sustained, creative, future-oriented collaboration among diverse actors. Facilitation is fundamental to this. Effective facilitators build trust and relationships and enable productive sharing, quality decision-making or dynamic innovation with groups. This unit expands on the essential ways of thinking and doing to be an effective, reflexive practitioner and facilitator of systemic change at a scale relevant to you and your current or future context. The unit will build your critical awareness of leading theories of systemic change and system transformation. These come from diverse, often interdisciplinary and practice-led origins. You will become aware of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and deep dive into at least one. These theoretical foundations and deeper knowledge will inform and guide your systemic practice. Common to most systemic change approaches is the need to convene diverse perspectives to set visions, goals or map future-oriented action pathways. You will be equipped with facilitation principles and collaboration design tools to enable you to creatively plan and run powerful, purposeful workshops, meetings and other gatherings to advance positive systemic change.

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

The Handbook lists no prerequisite, corequisite or prohibition for this unit.

Learning outcomes

1. Critically investigate how major schools of thought in systemic change seek to advance transformation;
2. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a systemic change approach in relation to a real-world complex challenge;
3. Reflexively position your own practice, specific change projects, and emerging concepts in relation to current thinking on systemic change;
4. Describe principles of facilitation and collaboration design for systemic change processes;
5. Creatively design, convincingly present, and justify with theory, a facilitated process to enable future-oriented dialogue between diverse voices in relation to a complex challenge.

Workload

In total, you can expect to commit a total of ~144 hours of work across the teaching period. On-campus • One 3-hour workshop and • Nine hours of independent study per week. Online • One 2-hour workshop and • Ten hours of independent study per week The reason for this discrepancy is that the on campus offering will dedicate more time toward in-class reflective activities (for the Systemic practice journal), while the online offering will require you to complete this activity primarily in your own-time, to better suit the time constraints and flexibility needs of part time/professional students who are more likely to take the evening online stream. However, as online students, you will still have a dedicated opportunity in each week’s synchronous class to discuss, ask questions about, and receive support for these activities.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.