What Is a Worldview? How Does It Shape Our Experiences?
A worldview is a lens through which we see the world and our place in it. Operating mostly outside our awareness, a worldview functions as a sort of automatic filter that shapes our perceptions and influences our goals, desires, motivations, values, relationships, and behaviors.
Worldviews are influenced by many factors, such as family, politics, religion, and community, among others, and can be both individually held and culturally shared.
Why Does It Matter?
IONS research suggests that becoming proficient at worldview literacy — the capacity to critically examine and integrate your own and others’ worldviews — may be the single most important step a person can take to reach their highest potential.
As today’s students grapple with unprecedented changes in lifestyle and technology, unpredictable challenges to global sustainability, and an ever-expanding array of choices to connect within and across cultures, it is more critical than ever that they learn to navigate new perspectives calmly, quickly, and compassionately.
The Worldview Explorations Program provides teachers with worldview literacy training and curriculum for middle-school and high-school aged students. Through our online self-study facilitator training program, teachers and others who work with young people, can learn how to assist students in examining, understanding, and appreciating the fundamental role that worldviews play in shaping our perceptions and behaviors. The student program complements and enhances academic training, and is based upon sound Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) practices.
The Worldview Explorations educational initiative grew out of over four decades of research on the exploration of consciousness and worldview by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Worldview Explorations provides an opportunity for students to hone their skills at sharing authentically, listening with an open mind and heart, and building more meaningful relationships with their peers, teachers, and the outside world.
Register by November 17th and receive a 15% discount! Use the code: we-ft-15
At the beginning of the semester, we talked about making the class a community where every individual has the space to contribute and speak out what is ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ for them while everyone else listens. I tried to imagine what that place would be like, but I just couldn’t see anything. Now I have seen it and I think that it is the most beautiful thing ever.11th-grade Student, Oakland, CA
