Charlene Rajendran | Collective Change Institute
Charlene Rajendran
- Skilled-Reflective Listener, Creative-Imaginative Interlocutor
- 35 years of experience as educator and facilitator in the arts, focused on dialogic and collaborative processes across disciplines
- Lived in Malaysia, the UK and Singapore; travels to diverse places for work and play
- Deeply curious about living in precarious and uncertain times, keen to enlarge spaces of hope, care and understanding across difference.
Professional Background
Charlene has been an educator and arts practitioner in diverse institutions and organisations for over three decades. In these spaces she focuses on dialogic and collaborative methods of engaging, holding space for exploration of ideas that relate to self, society and global shifts. She has taken on varied leadership roles that have sharpened her capacity to navigate through challenging situations and work with people from multiple contexts. In particular, her collaborators, colleagues and students appreciate her capacity to ask good questions and steer rich dialogue.
She has been actively involved in socially-engaged arts projects that emphasise the importance of agency and community. As dramaturg and researcher, she has cultivated skills and generated frameworks for interaction, participation and deep connection across boundaries of difference. Her work as educator and facilitator has been widely recognized and awarded.
Charlene continues to initiate new ways to teach and learn, listen and respond, explore and experiment, in education and the arts. She draws on these skills and experiences to shape her work as a coach. In 2023 she completed the Aletheia Advanced Coaching Program Level One.
Coaching Specialty
- Life-Coaching – Deepening Agency and Purpose
- Coaching for Educators – Reviewing Work and Play
- Coaching for Arts Practitioners – Enhancing Arts Practice
- Coaching through Transition – Navigating Precarity
Personal Background
Charlene is deeply interested in the diverse ways that we live our lives, particularly in urban multicultural contexts where difference can be challenging. She applies her capacity to listen deeply, reflect openly and respond truthfully, to work situations, relationships and creative endeavours. She reads widely to enhance her ongoing capacity to learn and unlearn, seeking change and transformation towards inclusive and hopeful alternatives.
Charlene has enjoyed working on a range of arts projects, with diverse collaborators across multiple disciplines. She values experimentation and the need to continually review what is relevant and resonant in everyday life. Her curiosity about ‘what it takes to turn up for each other’ has prodded her to deepen her ability to be present, gain awareness and attend to what emerges.
Her journeys to different places on the planet have led to ongoing inner journeys to different parts of her continually shifting personhood. She writes about this in poetry and prose, sometimes for the public, often for private reading.
Coaching Style
- Open and Attentive
- Person-Centred and Contextually-Grounded
- Purposeful and Focused
- Warm and Poetic
Personal Philosophy
Open dialogue and reflective conversation enable us to journey deep within and across wide terrain. As we navigate challenges with curiosity, courage and connection, we sense complexity and encounter beauty. This generates space to become whole.
