project Worldview copyright 2007 Home
Mission Statement
As a non-profit, non-sectarian, educational organization devoted to "Helping
You Find Your Own Answers to Life's Big Questions," providing "Education for the Global
Village," and helping people make sense out of "the confusion of
existence," our mission is
1) to promote the idea that individuals should consciously be aware of their
deeply held beliefs, values and associated long-term behavior patterns, that is,
they should actively and analytically be concerned with both the contents and
the development of their worldviews.
2) to aid an individual's worldview development by providing a free inquiry based systematic approach
loosely guided by worldview development questions.
3) to develop and steadily refine a framework and methodology
that serves as a tool for understanding,
analyzing, checking for consistency, and comparing / contrasting individual
worldviews, despite the complexity of the task. We hope that this
tool is useful in understanding conflicts in
terms of the underlying conflicting worldviews, and aiding the search for
common ground and satisfactory conflict resolution. We anticipate working
with researchers and other interested people in refining our
creation.
4) to humbly express the hope that all people
come to have a healthy worldview, one that brings
happiness and promotes planetary well-being. We
shall do this while abiding by a "Neutrality Pledge" and not pushing our beliefs
on visitors to our website or users of our
Worldview Kit
to the extent of
failing to also promote (or shielding them from) competing ones.
Who We Are / How We Came to Be
The origins of project Worldview can be traced to the late 1980s collaboration between
Stephen P. Cook and Donella H. Meadows that resulted in the book Coming of
Age in the Global Village (1990, Parthenon Books). This book contains the version 1.0 structure for analyzing
worldviews, employing twenty-six worldview themes. After using it at Arkansas
Tech University and the Arkansas School for Mathematics and Science where he taught,
Cook decided to expand and refine the structure for
analyzing worldviews in 2003. Thus project Worldview
was born. By late 2006, he had created the project Worldview
web site and produced The Worldview
Kit. At the heart of both is the version 2.0 structure for
understanding and analyzing worldviews--employing eighty worldview themes on
fifty-two individual
cards or frames. Written before the internet existed in modern form, Coming of
Age in the Global Village almost anticipates surfing the web
with its accounts of "shopping in the Reality Marketplace" in
exploring the worldview themes presented there. Now,
years later, it seems fitting that using the heart of this project Worldview
website, Take me to The Reality Marketplace, to explore version 2.0 worldview
themes with the "More to Explore" links provided for each of them, is
an internet adventure. Enjoy!
Dedication
Unfortunately by the time project Worldview
was formally launched at the end of 2006, Donella Meadows,
pioneering environmental scientist, longtime Dartmouth College professor, and
1994 MacArthur Prize winner, was no longer around, having suddenly died in 2001.
To honor both her important early contribution to
project Worldview
and her life work promoting global citizenship, systems thinking and building the sustainability
movement...
This website is dedicated to the memory of Donella Meadows.
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