Rafting into an Understanding of Living Systems
by Vicky Schubert
It was at an Astoria, Oregon inn, under a massive bridge that crosses the Columbia River, that Ruth Stiehl and Marilyn Lane first decided to teach people about systems by taking them on a raft trip. "As we talked," explains Ruth, "the imagery of the river was
right there, shaping our conversation. In its own emergent way, the river presented itself as an experiential tool to help people see the systems they were part of."
In her work with community college curriculum developers, and in her book The Assessment Primer, Ruth had frequently used the river as a metaphor for illustrating useful systems concepts. Recently hired by Clatsop Community College to support its accreditation initiative, she impressed Marilyn--a 12-year board member for the college--with her deep, yet simple, approach to defining institutional outcomes. As the curriculum director for a K-12 school district, Marilyn saw an opportunity to expand the impact of their work to include a broader system.
The two brought together a group of faculty and administrators from pre-K through community college for an experiential training pilot. After an exciting run on the Deschutes River--a Columbia tributary 100 miles to the north--the rafters returned to a classroom for some reflection. Ruth laid down a rope and put segments across it to illustrate how the group related to each phase of the education process as separate and distinct--early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school, community college.
Ruth asked the group to show what it would look like if the learning were more systemic. The participants drew the rope into a circle, a perfect segue for talking about the river. "If you ask most people to draw a picture of a river," notes Ruth, "they will draw a line. It might squiggle a little bit or have some bands, but it will just be a line. And when you actually look at a river system, it's not a line at all. It's a matter of streams and tributaries--a complex basin."
Additionally, a river is dynamic; it goes someplace. Unlike a pond, it has energy, it has engagement, and it recreates itself. When you stand way back and take a macro view, the whole hydraulic system keeps the earth alive. "We invited the group to think about education in those terms," Ruth explains. "Education is a vital, dynamic resource that keeps our communities alive. If you have a nursing program at a community college, the educational basin includes all the feeder schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, social service agencies, and people who contribute to the education, while the college provides that primary stream that connects it all together."
The successful pilot led Ruth and Marilyn to establish the White Water Institute, a nonprofit organization that brings a river-based experiential systems thinking curriculum to community college administrators, community groups, and individuals seeking deeper connections between their personal and professional lives. The Institute uses professional guides to help groups navigate a twelve-mile stretch of the Deschutes, through rapids rated from class two to class four. In the process, participants learn about teamwork and gain awareness of the nature of organic systems, particularly in terms of flow and change.
Key to teaching about systems, Ruth believes, is helping people shift their perspective to look for patterns. "When you look at a river, you're looking at processes. In processes there are patterns that you can learn to observe. We're terribly deficient, particularly in our educational systems, in recognizing patterns, because we don't make the effort to get far enough away from things to see the patterns that exist." The river experience gives participants the distance they need to recognize how prevailing educational and organizational paradigms prevent schools from operating as healthy, living systems.
Neither easy nor quick, the lessons of the river can take a long time to implement. Participants come to recognize that real transformation requires patience and persistence. As one rafter observed, "Patterns of behavior are difficult to alter. Ways of thinking after years of practice are not as flexible as I may wish. I feel supported by systems thinking skills. However, when I'm under stress I fail to remember them, so I need to go and remember what I learned on the river."
Vicky Schubert is marketing director at Pegasus Communications.