Translating Complexity Through Embodied Systems Awareness in Higher Education

Increasing international complexity and uncertainty challenges us to consider the future world state we create. The platform of higher education provides a space to equip the next generation of thinkers with perspectives, methods and approaches to navigate uncertain times through complexity theory. Despite the explicit focus on complexity within transdisciplinary approaches and the established link between embodied learning to enhanced student outcomes, research to date on how and why educators utilise embodied learning to enhance understanding of complexity within transdisciplinary higher education is still an emerging domain of scholarship. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to share how and why transdisciplinary educators from the UTS Transdisciplinary School approach the design, delivery and impact of embodied learning to support educating for complexity in a transdisciplinary co-joint degree. Six key insights are presented in this paper: (1) influences for implementation, (2) perceived student benefits, (3) perceived educator benefits, (4) implementation across a programme curriculum, (5) creating enabling conditions and (6) reflexive adaption across contexts. Through collaborative autoethnographic inquiry, this research surfaces embodied systems awareness as central to how we educate for complexity in transdisciplinary higher education. We demonstrate how embodied learning approaches support dynamic engagement with complex challenges, principles and characteristics and why this proves valuable in transdisciplinary higher education.