From Conquest to Participation
Reimagining education as a living system within a community of practice
This essay was originally written for the Schumacher College essay contest: ‘Education as if people and planet matter’, now published in Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet, Global Resilience Publishing, October 2022. Order in hardback or on Kindle HERE
“Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.” — Grace Lee Boggs
In an increasingly unstable and rapidly changing world, there can be no higher value or greater measure of success than the cultivation of wellbeing within disruption. With the global decline in social, spiritual, and ecological wellbeing it is imperative that we learn how to counter volatility with vision, meet uncertainty with understanding, react to complexity with clarity, and remedy ambiguity with agility. However, the cultivation of these qualities is not a practice within current education systems. Rather, education has become a contributing factor to disruption, generating graduates who lack a deep understanding of self, community, and Nature — and the healthy capabilities that arise from these relationships.
Vital to human development and cultural health are experiential learning, inquiry, and the practice of emergent learning, yet these are not part of current education systems, which focus primarily on relaying trending facts and skills. The symptoms of escalating teacher and student burnout, fragmentation of mental health, and increasing social, spiritual, and ecological divisions all show that a different approach to education is needed.
While education systems are an accomplishment of complex networks that reach around the world, connecting individuals, organizations, cultures, philosophies and perspectives, their detrimental symptoms show that the education tools used by these networks are helpful only on the surface. While alternative education movements worldwide are demanding a new capacity in education and strive for holistic, humanitarian learning, these movements often fail to move beyond protest and dissent towards becoming influential forces that are truly regenerative. Without a conscientious foundation, educational experiences cannot encourage resilience, bring awareness, or pass on the inheritance of a culture. The regeneration of education and learning requires a shift not in the structure of our education system but the very foundation of our interactions. We need to seek the source of learning itself.
Disruption is not new. In every age, humanity has dealt with change by upgrading towards greater wellbeing and building a new collective experience. It is important to remember that we already have what we need in order to rise and meet our current challenges — within each of us is the inherent ability to learn from all of life, and to learn from disruption itself. We are now in the midst of an awesome humanitarian shift — the fragmentation of our relationship with Nature, self, and society is culminating as the end of the ‘Age of Conquest.’ However, the prescriptive foundation to this dying concept is still practiced within current education systems through the domination of facts and skills. While this model served a purpose as a step toward what we call ‘progress,’ its human-centric endeavors have endorsed a worldview that has led to the devastation of countless living systems for people and planet. Witnessing the destruction of ecology, psychology, and community brings the stark recognition that human beings are living systems, have evolved in living systems, and progress in living systems. Therefore, education needs to reflect these living systems and cultivate the human potential of learners, engaging our multifaceted nature, and awakening our latent powers of innovation, imagination, creativity, and wonder.
Contrary to current educational reform movements, it doesn’t take massive resources to engage change to a living systems view of education. A living systems foundational approach that accesses the source of learning is not something that needs to be invented. We can transform the current education system from the inside out just with a shift in perspective of our interactions: from that of conquest to that of participation. Not only is this possible but it has always been accomplished through an approach currently known as the community of practice. Community of practice is an effective, robust, and time-honored approach of participatory learning that creates the conditions to support holistic education and humanitarian development. Since the dawn of humanity, the community of practice has been the inherent model for how we come together in ethical, aesthetic space to learn from one another, from our environment, and from all of life. As a social structure requiring conscious participation and co-creation, the highly intentional community of practice is becoming known as a ‘generative community’, for incorporating the tools and practices of mindfulness and wellbeing and implements learning for both individual and collective development. While the participants may engage in the collaboration of dialogue and activities, it is the highly intentional practices of deep listening, generative conversation, and co-creation that allow for discoveries to emerge from the synergy of individual, collective, and ecosystem. The co-creative experience allows for a gestalt shift in the essential understanding of interdependence and facilitates the recognition of human development as an aspect of the unfolding of one’s ecosystem, intricately interwoven with the living systems of which one is a part. This is how the sustainable traditions of ancient social structures evolved to deal with disruption — by intentionally participating in the evolution of consciousness. These wisdom traditions show us that we do not need to ‘unlearn’ or ‘re-learn’ or even ‘learn how to learn’. The source of learning is to allow, invite, and hold space for the inner integration of knowledge and experience.
We can transform the current education system from the inside out just with a shift in perspective of our interactions: from that of conquest to that of participation
The further recognition of living systems is essential if we are to move beyond the protest and dissent of ‘alternative education’ to learning practices that are truly regenerative and serve the wellbeing of all of life. As Otto Scharmer, author of Leading From the Emerging Future reminds us, “We cannot change a system unless we change consciousness. And we cannot change consciousness unless the system can sense and see itself.” Within the experience of participatory learning in a highly intentional community of practice we come to understand how the activity of the individual and the collective support one another to generate a living system. The American systems scientist, Peter Senge, encourages us to see that people are agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of which they are a part. This ego-to-eco perspective is, “A shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future.”
The symbiotic and regenerative balance achieved by the generative community as a living system manages negative internal impacts while allowing for the growth of both the individual and the collective; uplifting the individual to overcome the oppressions of groupthink consensus or the isolation of circumstances and honoring the collective wisdom by taming the ego of the individual. This dynamic generates a unique form of psychological safety which then supports the pursuit of inquiry/co-inquiry, reflective practices, and constructive feedback. It is conducive to the synergy of indigenous forms of learning, wisdom traditions, and the diversity of social innovation and ethical space needed to evolve the education system. Most importantly, this container allows for the quiet moment of integration that is the source of learning itself. The community of practice is then the key to cultivating participatory learning and encouraging regenerative practices for individual, collective, and ecological wellbeing.
An innovation to bridge the divide from current dominant education models to that of participatory learning can be accomplished with teaming practices which encourage creativity and collaboration. Another key innovation is in assessments, which provide an important reflective practice for growing individual and collective awareness. Designed with the recognition of supporting holistic agency rather than testing for accuracy of specialization, it is possible for assessments to exhibit progress in curiosity, compassion, and courage, and can be documented through a portfolio of experiences. A synergy of self-assessments, peer-assessments, as well as educator and community assessments can support us in avoiding outdated conquest pedagogies, or the lure of providing progress for corporate culture.
Emerging examples of such innovative and generative communities of practice are The Presencing Institute — cultivating awareness-based systems change; Turtle Island Institute — cultivating indigenous social innovation; Dartington Trust and Schumacher College — cultivating regenerative and transformative learning practices; Shelburne Farms — cultivating learning for sustainability; Extinction Rebellion — non-violent civil disobedience for Climate and Ecological Emergency and regeneration; Weston A Price Foundation — nutrition advocacy and traditional foods education; The Society for Organizational Learning — cultivating capacity for organizational learning; Permaculture — cultivating regenerative agriculture practices, and there are many more.
The regeneration of education and learning begins with the cultivation of wellbeing within disruption and continues by bridging the divides of ignorance. The current challenges of failing ecosystems, fragmenting mental health, and faltering social systems offer the opportunity to remedy the social disease of indifference and educate for greater social, spiritual, and ecological wellbeing. The conscientious innovations of highly intentional, generative communities of practice are rising to meet these challenges by cultivating participatory learning practices and the ethical space that supports psychological safety, nurtures wellbeing, and allows deeper sources of knowing to arise and integrate. They are demonstrating that the evolution of education and learning is to activate a shift in perspective from valuing domination to appreciating participation. For the wellbeing of people and planet, it is now essential that we awaken each other to our latent powers of innovation, imagination, creativity, and wonder.
Regen Collective is a multinational organization that cultivates awareness practices for social regeneration. We are a community-of-practice for the regeneration of education and learning, with community gatherings on the first Friday of each month. Regen Collective is also a u.lab hub: a self-organized group exploring awareness-based practices to support positive cultural change. As a collective, we seek to shift the education system from the inside out, to support the emergence of new social cohesion, and disrupt cycles of ruin in a nonviolent and evolutionary manner. Learn more about participating in Regen Collective HERE.
Regen Collective was created within the Societal Transformation Lab of The Presencing Institute in order to co-create awareness practices for social regeneration and cultivate the conditions needed for the evolution of education and learning towards holistic and humanitarian practices. We look forward to cultivating this with you!
Please consider donating to support the work of Regen Collective HERE
