Visual Thesis on Participatory Learning
Throughout my exploration of the education field, I have often been asked if I can recommend a path of education success by clarifying the territory of ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION and defining HOLISTIC LEARNING. After 20 years of action research in everything from INTRINSIC MOTIVATION to EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING, my answer is still NO — because I feel that learning is not meant to be constrained with packaging and labels.
Outside of the box of modern education, however, I have encountered a very special treasure: language that invokes the archetypal process of becoming. I found this in aspects of PARTICIPATORY KNOWING from Goethean science, PRESENCING AND ABSENCING from TheoryU, and the PROCESS-RELATIONAL PHILOSOPHY of Alfred North Whitehead. Bringing together these brilliant philosophical gifts, I crafted this visual thesis on Participatory Learning to help communicate the archetype of education and learning that seems lost in the modern world.
In this visual thesis, the TheoryU arc is the key visual aspect that articulates the potential of a learning journey. I translated the concepts of presencing and absencing to show the important contrast of our participatory nature with Control Culture to better clarify the struggles, challenges, and pain points within the education system.
A key aspect of awareness-based systems change is the ability to articulate the process; to identify and elucidate empowers us to make meaningful changes on personal, social, and global levels. With the poetic license of the Participatory Arc, I hope to support the cultivation of more participatory practices and empower the best possible future of a Participatory Culture. No model is perfect, and this one especially is not meant to be analyzed intellectually. This is meant to remind you of your own participatory nature and the process you are already engaged in, empowering the changes you already know that you want to make.
This thesis is the foundation of an upcoming project to promote participatory practices that have proven to be powerful tools in helping individuals and organizations to overcome unique challenges. Personalized Learning in schools, coaching practices, mentorship programs, and action research are just a few of the practices that anyone can apply to shift from conquest to participation.
I look forward to sharing this project with you all as it emerges. If you are interested in participating, please contact Regen Collective at presencing.educators@gmail.com.
PARTICIPATORY LEARNING VISUAL THESIS
Participatory: co-creative. The term ‘Participatory Learning’ is based on the Goethean science of participatory knowing. ‘Participatory’ refers to the experience of ‘being in resonance with’. Participatory Learning cannot be defined, but can be described as learning from relational experiences within a participatory ecosystem: the innate experience of integrating the experiences that arise from deep sensing and deeper sources of knowing, resulting in ever-new integral consciousness. The terms in this visual thesis are intended to be interpretable and the use of synonyms is encouraged.
PLEASE SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS AND REFLECTIONS:
What about this visual thesis encourages your passion for teaching and learning or leadership?
How does this visual thesis address challenges and pain points in education or leadership that you have experienced?
How might you apply this image or concept to articulate the processes in your life and work?
Please share in the comment box below or long answers to presencing.educators@gmail.com
CONTRASTING CONTROL CULTURE and PARTICIPATORY NATURE
TAKING A DEEP DIVE:
PARTICIPATORY LEARNING VISUAL THESIS description
The Participatory Arc description
Participatory Learning is an innate human capacity that can be cultivated into evermore sophisticated forms of education. It requires a loving, participatory ecosystem, such as a highly intentional community of practice, to support the deep dive experience of integrating inspiration and rising towards the mastery of a practice. This ‘Regenerative Education’ is an archetype with many possible expressions in pedagogy, beyond labels and branding.
Below the surface of perceived performance, experiences of playfulness create meaningful connections and naturally lead to and compound as exploration, empathy, and generativity/ generosity. Crossing the thresholds of curiosity, compassion, and courage shifts one’s sense and sense perception, developing ever greater understanding of meaningful connections, inquiry, passion, and creativity.
The integration of learning is experienced as inspiration and enables shifts in capacity and ability. The emergence of enhanced perception naturally leads to and compound into co-creation, innovation, and the mastery of a practice. Crossing the thresholds of resonance, novelty, and integrity develops the capacities of vision, teaming, and r/evolutionary transformation. Mastery of a practice is then a process of evolutionary advance, guided by mentors in a participatory ecosystem, and develops the mastery of mentors to provide further guidance into the evolutionary advance of a practice, social system, or society.
Participatory Culture emerges when we are allowed to be, allowed to belong, and allowed to become. Individual experiences are integrated into one’s interior condition and then expressed as enhanced capacity into the social field resulting in an education that is regenerative to individuals, society, and ecosystem.
Regenerative Education is a holistic system of enhancing our innate capacity of participatory learning: education as evolutionary advance through the process of integrating learning experiences, with fractal patterns of movement through thresholds of understanding in a participatory ecosystem. It expresses E.F. Schumacher’s concept of ‘the science of understanding’. Inner experiences of love and longing generate movement through the levels of learning, levels of participation, and the thresholds of sense perception. A sense of aesthetic beauty and generosity resulting in the evolutionary advance of a practice, social system, or society is the proof of this process.
The Control Arc description
Dominant education is: the use of conquest and control tactics to dominate learning processes in order to instill pre-decided forms of understanding. Control culture emerges from acts of domination, where learning is a synthetic system to superimpose knowledge in individuals, society, and an ecosystem. Within a system of dominance, synthetic knowledge is constructed through experiences of inadequacy, enmity, and exclusion.
Below the surface of perceived performance, isolation in rote experiences lead to and compound as passivity, regimentation, and discipline. Crossing the thresholds of indifference, objectivity, and desolation shifts one’s sense and sense perception, developing ever greater expressions of isolation, apathy, mechanization, and conformity.
These experiences are impressed upon one’s interior condition through mimicry and conformity tests, where failures fracture one’s capacity and ability, allowing only pre-decided forms of understanding to remain. Concealment of other ways of knowing leads to and compounds into further polarizing, sedating, and disabling of innate participatory capacities. Crossing the thresholds of contempt, possession, and suppression deepens the impacts of prejudice, manipulation, and exploitation, leading to the entrenchment of the superimposed knowledge.
Dominant Education produces, replicates, and spreads superimposed knowledge through entrainment with the purpose of maintaining a pattern of the past or cloning a culture. It expresses E.F. Schumacher’s concept of ‘the science of manipulation’ and instills an artificial binary perspective. Inner experiences of failure and desperation perpetuate this process. Extraction and a sense of greed is the proof of this process. The parasitic nature of control culture disallows natural advances of a social system and leads to social degeneration with the eventual collapse of a practice, a social or civilizational system. In this way, it can be considered a social disease.
NAVIGATING THE SOCIAL FIELD
Our everyday interactions and social experiences in the modern world are a muddle of the participatory and control gestures. Through mindfulness and reflection we can come to recognize and contrast these gestures. By cultivating this discernment, we can navigate the social field and become evermore aware of how these gestures compound into participatory culture or control culture.
Much of current education and modern culture is based on systems of dominance which creates an artificial binary perspective. However, each individual’s experience of education and learning is a combination of both the processes of participatory and domination, often resulting in perception becoming stuck on one level of experience — most commonly, the level of exploration and inquiry with repetitions of seeking novelty and innovation (Level 2 of Theory U).
An educator has the ability to shift any process of education or any learning ecosystem by changing their approach from domination to the participatory. By becoming aware of the progression of these processes and evaluating one’s interior condition, one can shift their perception to support and cultivate participatory practices. One can then hold space for the relationality of participatory learning. The process of regenerative education then naturally emerges and compounds into participatory culture.
Any person who is in the flow of experiencing the participatory arc will invoke a participatory resonance in those around them. In this way, we overcome the compounding of conquest and control tactics that have disrupted innate participatory experiences and suppressed organic evolution. With practice, we can shed the binary perspective and quell the social disease of conquest and domination by cultivating regenerative education for social renewal.
Adaptation from Theory U
Credits
Created by Lauren Elizabeth Clare during u.lab 2x. Adapted from Theory U by Otto Scharmer, The Presencing Institute, with terms from Goethean Science and the Process-Relational Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Creative Commons licenses apply.
