The College Fix

Last Thursday evening to help celebrate North Carolina State’s fifth-annual Diversity Education Week, Shakti Butler spoke to participants about challenging the “diversity status quo.”

Dr. Butler is the founder of World Trust, “a foundation that works to eliminate social and racial injustice through transformational education.”

The NC State Technician reports:

Butler’s speech, titled Cracking the Codes: Systems of Inequity, was part of the Fall Diversity Dialogue. Throughout her speech, Butler showed videos, posed questions and encouraged audience discussion about the importance of promoting racial equality.

Butler used collective understanding and strengths to approach developing solutions for pressing problems in the world today.

Transformative learning is all about understanding people’s deeply embedded assumptions about how they think the world really works and unearthing those assumptions to make appropriate changes, Butler said.

“We are born into a system we did not create,” Butler said. “We’ve stepped into a history we did not create. And, most importantly, we have a responsibility to use our collective gifts to create a racially and socially equal world that we want our children’s children to experience.”

Here’s how Butler’s World Trust describes “Transformative Learning”:

Transformative learning is a form of adult education involving experiences that result in a deep, structural shift in thoughts and feelings, which then inform one’s actions. This shift in consciousness can be very subtle or quite extraordinary. Often, it alters our way of making meaning and being in the world. Such a deep-seated shift involves our understanding and our relationships with other people, the natural world, and ourselves.

Butler received a lot of attention back in 2007 when her materials served as the basis for the University of Delaware’s so-called “Residence Life” program. The main concern of that program was that it was mandatory, and involved asking students very invasive questions. (See here, also.)

Butler was reportedly “stunned” by the negative reaction to the UD program, saying “I’ve never had this kind of reaction,” and “I call this reaction totally reactionary and designed to create a deep divide among people, which is the antithesis of what I’m trying to do.”

Dr. Butler’s PhD is from the School of Transformative Learning and Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She says the fact that she is multi-racial — African, Arawak Indian and Russian-Jewish — gives her “credibility.”

Read the full Technician article.

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