Learning to Change Our World View Creating Symbionic Collective Transdisciplinary Wisdom in the Metacrisis

Deep transdisciplinary learning is essential to responding to the current collapse of human societies and ecosystems and to building a more sustainable, just future for all living creatures. Our modern civilizations, which are built around ideas of neverending technoscientific progress and neoliberal values of market fundamentalism, and individualism, are destroying planetary health. Fundamental shifts in ethics and thinking about our relationships to nature and each other are needed to prevent our species from joining the human accelerated Sixth Extinction. Lifelong learning based on emotionally powerful and joyful experiences needs to focus on the complexly interconnected issues that constitute the social, political, economic, and ecological-based metacrisis. Universities need to transform through supporting the boundary exploration and future-orientated nature of transdisciplinary scholarship. Intergenerational teams embedded in the community congregated around tables rather than solo professors occupying chairs may be a creative vehicle for organizational transformation. Experiences with transdisciplinary programs at Case Western Reserve University, University of Oxford, Brown University, and Johns Hopkins University will be described that demonstrate a diversity of responses to the challenges of academic reorganization in the metacrisis, but also showcase common border spanning activities and commitment to innovative and socially transformative, transdisciplinary scholarship.