From the President


Welcome to another great issue of Winds & Waves,
the online magazine of ICA International.

The theme of this issue is Imaginal Education, a whole-person approach to life and learning that has been at the core of ICA’s work in human development and participatory social change since it began some 50 years ago. The 2012 book Changing Lives Changing Societies, republished by ICA International this year, quotes Gail West of ICA Taiwan:

“Imaginal learning is what ICA has always been about. Enabling the shifting of one's images or internal pictures of ‘what is’ is what directs my beliefs and behaviour. As a facilitator or trainer, or any person supporting another’s development, my understanding is that learning requires image shift. In order for that to happen, a person needs to change the messages that one pays attention to. No change in learning, no change in behaviour.”

This important link between self-image and personal behaviour remains core to ICA’s approach to ToP facilitation and human development worldwide, as illustrated by the many rich and varied stories from ICA colleagues included in that book. It has also been at the heart of the global, online community of practice on Reshaping Education for the 21st Century that grew out of the 8th ICAI Global Conference on Human Development hosted last year by ICA Nepal in Kathmandu.

This issue draws on the work of that community of practice and others to share something of what works, and some of the challenges and the rewards, of applying such an Imaginal Learning approach in the field of education and more broadly. Marge Philbrook of ICA USA writes about the ICA Archives project in Chicago, and its efforts to make these and other ICA models and tools from the archives more available online to a new generation. Svitlana Salamatova and her colleagues of ICA Ukraine, in a country and a city currently in the midst of profound social change, write about their use of online communication tools for connecting, learning and empowering communities. Nelson Stover and Shankar Jadhav share insights from ICA India’s ‘Global classroom in a village school’, and Isabel de la Maza writes of changing self-images in Chile. Mane Arratia writes of ICA Spain’s facilitation role in the global conferences of Initiatives of Change in Caux, Switzerland, and Amani Jensen-Bentley of Australia provides ‘a teen’s perspective on a rural Aussie initiative aimed at celebrating multiculturalism’. 

As I write, ICA International has just completed its third series of online regional gatherings this year to connect ICAs and ICA colleagues and facilitate peer-to-peer learning and collaboration worldwide, and we are poised for our online General Assembly in a couple of days’ time. Nineteen ICAs participated and shared reports for the regional gatherings. In this issue, you will find an overview of the gatherings and excerpts from some of those reports.

You will also find a scattering of graphs, maps and word clouds, illustrating both the diversity and the commonalities of our global ICA community. These are drawn from the 37 responses to this year’s new ICAI global membership survey that we have received from ICA locations around the world. We are grateful to all those who took the time and effort to respond.

I hope you will agree that all this makes for a stimulating and inspiring read. Please let us know what you think, and connect and learn with each other online, by posting your thoughts on our Facebook page.

Martin Gilbraith - London, UK
president@ica-international.org