This chapter analyzes the case of one urban public school district's efforts to provide coherent support for student-centered teaching across all the high schools, through the role of the Learning Leader. The Learning Leader designation replaced the previous Department Head or Curriculum Leader role. The implementation of this change of designation created numerous challenges due to various interpretations of the role. The district's efforts to provide professional development for the Learning Leaders was also caught up in the context of conflicting interpretations of the role of the Learning Leader. This chapter provides an analysis of the implementation of this change, including the use of the Integral Model (Wilber, 2006) to examine the interviews with high school Learning Leaders and principals, and the Professional Development program offered by the district. A number of recommendations are provided for enhancing the role of the Learning Leaders to optimize their work with teachers.

This chapter is based on the analysis of experiences of graduate students and professors using Integral Theory (IT) as transdisciplinary research framework, at a Western Canadian mainstream university. The traditional disciplinary orthodoxies, which had presented a formidable challenge to the acceptance of IT in mainstream academia, are briefly described. For example, not having a single disciplinary home, Integral academics do not fit into the traditional roles and their associated benefits. This applies both to professors and to graduate students. Integral students must continue to defend their research and professors must defend Integral teaching. Nevertheless, research is strengthened by an Integral worldview and a more complex understanding of the world. The chapter concludes with a specific discussion of how IT is employed to investigate multiple contexts of complex problems.

In this chapter we examine the notion of “active learning” through Wilber's Integral AQAL Model and through two learning models based on AQAL. Our examination of Edwards' integral learning and Renert and Davis' five stages of mathematics, results in a multi-perspective, multi-level notion of “active learning”. We demonstrate, through the development of a rubric to gauge students' “activeness”, the complexity of what is involved in the teaching and learning process when one becomes mindful of the perspectives and levels (AQAL) that are present for every student. Several episodes of learning are used to show how each theoretical model applies, and an extended episode, which illustrates a student's repair strategy on a mathematically erroneous concept, is used to illustrate the analysis of the extent of active learning. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the rubric of active learning, along with the four continua, can help teachers be mindful of the multiple perspectives that influence learning.

Call for Submissions for the  Special Issue of Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry (CPI), Fall 2021 entitiled "Beauty and the Beast:  Using creative expression to envision a just society amid post-truth politics, pandemic, and climate change"

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on two growing trends in academia, particularly in the humanities, which separately contribute to self-censorship, doublespeak, obsessive crafting of personal brands, egocentrism, and sanitized discourse and publication output. Using Wilber’s Integral metatheory, these trends are linked to two developmental levels within academic populations that exist alongside each other in the contexts that support and perpetuate them. One is the corporate university context, which is competitive and brand driven, supporting the formal operational “Orange” developmental level. The other is the pluralistic “Green” level, which is characterized by relativism and political correctness. Both developmental levels are currently gravitating toward their pathological expressions, resulting in extreme self-censorship within both populations. This self-censorship in turn often results in publication output that is neutered: trivial in content, extremely politically correct, not leading, not risking, not asking significant questions, and thus not making meaningful contributions to the wider community.