Showing posts with label regenerative education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regenerative education. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Envisioning Educating-With - and Supporting the Detox of Dependency in Learners to Nurture Ecofractal Networks of Interconnected Imagination

Grading and evaluation are troubling topics in regenerative education. If we are deeply committed to students moving from intrinsic motivation, interest, and curiosity, yet teach within dominant-culture organizations, what are we to do? 

Students have been enculturated in external locus of control evaluation. I'm teaching a class right now where the students develop their own rubrics for deep self-evaluation. Yet some students continue to not show up as much as they would, not contribute as much as they would than if every discussion and activity had specific points associated with it. The reductionism, hierarchy, and externalization of value intrinsic to dominator culture education structures would tend toward classrooms of dis-integrated nodes of action that can be independently enumerated. 

I imagine co-designing with students a detox regimen where they can reorient around intrinsic motivation and geared toward interconnective co-creative explorations.  

Artwork by Barbara Wildenboer (Link)

In kinds of regenerative education informed by power-with, we might instead envision eddies and flows of integrating discussion across multiple activities and readings, and a connectivist ethos of collaborative inquiry. I fantasize mycelial rubrics of connection and collaboration and mutual making. How can we co-generate networks of fresh connection and co-nurturing extensions of knowledge? ...And what software, rather than the hyperstructure of Canvas or the dungeons of diffraction in Moodle, might support such network making? A mashup of decentered mindmapping and rich media? Perhaps with "scores" for fluidity, flexibility, originality, and elaboration? Via citations, quotes at nodes, plus rich multimedia content, original drawings at nodes? And what about metapatterns of an ecofractal nature rather than simple radiance? A regenerative educator can always dream...


Monday, November 8, 2021

Regenerative Teaching for Oracular Futures - A Recent Proposal on Oracular Poems of Intersectional Climate Justice Futures: Ecotopia v Zombie Apocalypse

 Source: Deep Blutopia, San Diego 2121, Alan Marshall (Link)

I recently drafted this proposal for a 2022 International Poetic Inquiry conference. It relates to inviting people into playing a multi-day collaborative writing game I created called "Ecotopia Versus Zombie Apocalypse" (Game Guidelines here: https://www.earthregenerative.org/ecotopiavzombie/game

 

Starting with a couple of motivating quotes by Kagawa and Selby (2009) and Haraway (2017):

“Wherever it takes place, climate change education needs to be a social and holistic process… Looming rampant climate change calls for flexible learning and emergent curriculum approaches that embed climate change learning and action within community contexts…. The threat is also too urgent to any longer continue with epistemologically under-dimensioned learning confined to rational, linear, classificatory, and mechanistic ways of knowing and seeking to effect change. Employed exclusively, even predominantly, such ways of knowing are tantamount to applying disease as remedy. There is a need for the complementary and recursive use of artistic, embodied, experiential, symbolic, spiritual, and relational learning, especially in the vital task of reconnecting learners to the earth while enabling them to discover their (connected) identity and realize their full potentials.”  



(2009, pp. 242-243, Fumiyo Kagawa & David Selby, “Climate Change Education: A Critical Agenda for Interesting Times”)

“We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, and yearnings. So do all the critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking compositions and decompositions. Words for this might be materialism, evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, animism, and science art activisms, complete with the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Beings – human and not – become with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in earthly worlding and unworlding. All of us must become more ontologically inventive and sensible within the bumptious holobiome that earth turns out to be, whether called Gaia or a Thousand Other Names.” (Donna Haraway, 2017, p. M45)


Polychordal exuberance and post-apocalyptic incantation presage the way AnzaldĂșan queer-magical nepantlera poets (Anzaldua) cross the borderlands of transtemporal and transpatial climate justice to forge fresh futures. Macy (2020) asks, what might the future beings 200 years from now know about our contemporary acts of courage and bravery that help bring about their survivance? In the vicinity of Tsing’s monsters of the Anthropocene (2017) and Harawayian compostist future fictioning in the Cthulucene (2016), I explore the accounts incubated in graduate classrooms beyond the “zombie” wars, with intersectional ecofeminist, ecopsychological, climate justice, and queer ecological lenses. Using poetic inquiry methods, I share poems and intercepts from the struggles of the emergent future. Layering texts co-created with mythic beings, earth dwellers, and zombies, crafted by graduate students in intersectional ecofeminisms and sustainability innovation: fresh possibilities arise. How can we bust beyond binaries and imagine our way into the emergent unknown, leveraging patterns from biocultural and nature-based regeneration as templates for fresh possibilities? And how can the fruits of these fresh disjunctures and ethical rearrangements invite us into futures worth inhabiting? Listen, listen - a la Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Evidence” (2015) and M Archive: After the End of the World (2018) -  to the voices of the future beings, breathing their blessings, offering their encouragements and clarifications. Can poetry and creative writing direct a kind of distributive justice? At the quickening sensefield matrix, the intersectional juncture, the ecotonal deltaflux, tuned to sensitive sensing through poetic entrainment, we time travel and inmerge to greater wholeness. 

 

Partial References



Ambrose, Don. “Utopian Visions: Promise and Pitfalls in the Global Awareness of the Gifted.” Roeper Review, 30:52-60, 2008. doi: 10.1080/02783190701836460

Bigelow, Bill, and Tim Swinehart, Editors. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2014. 

Canty, Jeanine. “Seeing Clearly Through Cracked Lenses.” In Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices. Edited by Author, 23-44. New York: Routledge, 2017. 

Davies, Kate. Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2018.

Gardiner, Stephen Mark. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Evidence.” In Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edited by Walidah Marisha and adrienne maree brown, 34-41. Oakland: AK Press, 2015. 

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. M Archive: After the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.” In Arts of living on a damaged planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene. Edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Eds.), pp. M25-M50. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Hauk, Marna. “Ecotopia Versus Zombie Apocalypse: A Collaborative Writing Game: Game Guidelines.” Portland: Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, 2018. Retrieved from earthregenerative.org/ecotopiavzombie/game

Hauk, Marna. “‘Resilient Patterns Within a Vaster Web of Knowing’ – Hope, Agentic Sustainabilities, and Regenerative Integration in Educational Encounters.” (Manuscript in revision). Portland: Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, 2020. 

Hauk, Marna. “Ecotopia versus Zombie Apocalypse: Existential and Emotional Regeneration Through Collaborative Writing and Imagination.” Climate Justice Existential Toolkit. Edited by Jennifer Atkinson & Sarah J. Ray. In revision. 

Holmes, Christina. “Theorizing Ecofeminist Intersectionalities and Their Implications for Feminist Teachers.” In Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Edited by K. Melchor Quick Hall & Gwyn Kirk, 61-76. Lanham Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021.

Judson, G. “Re-imagining sustainability education: Emotional and imaginative engagement in learning.” Sustainability Frontiers, 205-220. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2015.

Kagawa, Fumiyo, and David Selby. “Climate Change Education: A Critical Agenda for Interesting Times.” In Education and Climate Change: Living and Learning in Interesting Times. Edited by David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, 241-243. Florence, Kentucky: Routledge, 2009.     

Krall, Florence. Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins. Albany: SUNY, 1994.

Leetch, Mandy. The​ ​Prophetesses​ ​at​ ​Play: Collaborative​ ​Storytelling,​ ​Mythic​ ​Justice,​ ​and​ ​Visioning​ ​Regenerative​ ​Futures [Conference Paper]. Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, 2018. 

Macy, Joanna, and Christopher Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (Rev. ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library, 2020. 

Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects (Rev. ed.). Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2014.

Olsen, Andrea. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. 

Sameshima, Pauline, Alexandra Fidyk, Kedrick James, and Carl Leggo. (Editors). Poetic Inquiry: Enchantment of Place. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2017. 

Selby, David, and Fumiyo Kagawa. “Drawing Threads Together: Transformative Agenda for Sustainability Education. In Sustainability Frontiers: Critical and Transformative Voices from the Borderlands of Sustainability Volume edited by the article authors, 277-280. Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2015.

Sobel, David. “Climate Change Meets Ecophobia.” Connect, 2007(Nov/Dec), 14-21. 

Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Editors.).  Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Monday, November 1, 2021

Sources of Strength for Regenerative Teaching and Learning 2: Intimations of the Ecopsychology of Deeper Learning

Given that educators have a desire to support students deepening beyond surface curiosity to deeper learning, what can ecopsychology offer?  What might deeper learning look like, including in online learning contexts?

As a follow-up to a recent post about grappling with grief as a way through to shifted perspectives and greater empathy, including grappling with Earth grief, I want to open an exploration of deeper learning. I noticed in two current online course discussions, how students can move towards convivial kibbitzing and avoid deeper lines of inquiry. 

 Is this because of a tension between relationship building and a fear of online attack, particularly because of intersectional dynamics with fewer interpersonal cues, including along dimensions of genders, sexualities, and social constructions of race? In feminist education this has sometimes been termed a "cozy" environment. We can all stay safe by agreeing, right? Here's a few online social technologies that can open things up:

  • Brave space guidelines can open up discussions (Backgrounder: Arao & Clemens, 2013; Guidelines for Brave Communication (AWARE-LA, n.d.)
  • Approaches that elicit deeper, creative and evaluative critical and innovative thinking, leveraging the inversion of Bloom's Taxonomy such that creative work is the zenith; its horizontalization in the Bloom's Rose (see Figure 2), applied to thinking and learning
 

 
Source: Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 



Source: Education Endowment Foundation (2018, 2021) - Source Page




Francis, 2016 - Source Article

Supporting students being metacognitive in their own teaching and learning has profound gains. I can model and encourage learners to dig deeper to ask creative questions (see EEF, 2021 Diagram above). These creative questions can catalyze mutual inquiries - very useful in generating deeper conversations. 
 
What might be an ecopsychological dimension to these questions that can take us deeper? I wonder how nimble perspective shifting, lithe creativity, and compassion sourced from the wellspring of ecoconnection and ecojustice ethics might support this deepening as well. How can we  with resilience. Perhaps we can apply these principles from Earthflow (Hauk, 2014, p. 361) to our shared explorations ...
 

 

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Sources of Strength for Regenerative Teaching and Learning 1: Encountering Rather than Resisting World Grief

Artist: Hokyoung Kim from  New York Times, 2019 (Article Link)

Much like appreciative inquiry, regenerative learning and teaching involves cycles of imagining, designing, transformation, and emergence. I have elsewhere explored different models of emergence in transformative learning, including teaching like a hurricane or storm, like vermiculture underground in winter fallowing, as metamorphosis, and as spring bud burst (Hauk, 2011). These kinds of vibrant processes leverage ecological emergence models as templates for teaching and learning. 

Collaborative creativity and complexity dynamics catalyze complex regenerative creativity as well (Hauk, 2015). Both of these models leverage the expansive dynamics of the spiral rather than a simple iterative cycle in learning. 

In a time when the end run of reductionist linearity can appear apocalyptic and extinctive, how do teachers recircuit and reconnect for spirals and continuity? Two resources come to mind. 

 In Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (Macy & Johnson, 2020), four shifts are born from reconnecting with and honoring our pain for the world. These shifts include re-perceiving a greater sense of self, a different kind of power-with, richer experiences in community, and enlarging views of time. These gifts come from reconnecting with our feelings of despair and releasing rather than repressing them. Our students are experiencing world-grief and despair about climate chaos and climate justice. Designing curriculum and approaches to create space for these experiences make the learning relevant for today's learners.

This reconnection opens up a profound  insight that what brings about these feelings is actually our connectedness with the larger cycles of life. We feel pain for mass extinction and the fate of our species because we are embedded inside of generative systems of the earth.  These activist-scholars explore how this reconnection opens up a great sourcing in creativity and a release of the deadening habits that we might have used to avoid the intense feelings. We regain time and energy because we are not continuously feeding our denial. 

How can our teaching and learning be informed by this ecopsychological insight? Malkia Devich-Cyril in adrienne maree brown's Holding Change offers further insight, "To Give Your Hands to Freedom, First Give them to Grief" (2021). They share, 

"Along my own journey, what surprised me most was the discovery that grief is not an enemy to be avoided. In fact, resisting grief led to my suffering, becoming intimate with grief led me to the lesson that grief and joy are inextricably linked. Though generations of traumatic loss can become conflated with deformed expectations, standards, and culture, grief in all its forms has the potential to bring us closer to the truth of the world, to make us more tender and more filled with delight. It is from this new kind of gratitude, this pandemic joy, that we can risk together in action, in democratic decision makin, in strategic vision. This is one part of liberation."
Future posts will explore how to create transformative space for this kind of opening to world grief and species despair.

Sunday, October 3, 2021

Teaching and Learning Regeneration - Part 1 - Riffing on Linda Hogan's Phrase, "Give Praise and Nurture Creation"

 

Linda Hogan offers in Dwellings...


"Without deep reflection, we have taken on the story of endings, assumed the story of extinction, and have believed that it is the certain outcome of our presence here. From this position, fear, bereavement, and denial keep us in the state of estrangement from our natural connection with land.

"We need new stories, new terms and conditions that are relevant to the love of land, a new narrative that would imagine another way, to learn the infinite mystery and movement at work in the world. It would mean we, like the corn people of the Maya, give praise and nurture creation."
from "Creations," in Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)'s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, p. 94

What does it mean to generate learning contexts that nurture regenerative frames and forms? There is a key dimension of the processes of regeneration, and regenerative education, where things get composted and forms shift. What if we reframed the current entrancement with the apocalyptic toward what Macy terms, "the great turning" (with Johnstone, 2022): a perspective shift, from obliteration, to regeneration? Yes, forms are changing. Cultures, lifestyles, and what Eisler and Fry (2019) call the partnership way offer pathways of shift from systems of domination into mutuality and reciprocity. And as all these resources suggest, the pivot is about nurturing.

How can this relate to teaching and learning?  

Regenerative teaching involves nurturing. Regenerative learning invites a creative engagement, an imagination of possibility grounded in vivid relationship with/as the land that nurtures us and that we can nurture. We invite ourselves into remembrance, often difficult and sometimes trauma-filled, as is the nature of our current situation. As Toni Morrison (2019) suggests in the following passage, remembrance is an act of coalescing, a pulling together, generating a greater belonging. When Morrison says text or narrative or plot, I also think, curriculum:

"Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle, between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and to not know became the structure of the text... the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process." (Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard, p. 324)

Teaching can invite and nurture regenerative remembrance. And in this regenerative remembrance, we are remembering, and unerasing and reclaiming, in somatic and experiential as well as earth-based and creative engagements. We are remembering our interrelatedness, our possibility, and our wholenesses. We are regrowing the ligaments and tendons of connectedness. We are re-bodying the healthy ancestors and ancient lifeways. We are remembering our futures and building relationship with the future beings, for they are the ones that know the brave acts we undertake that create their future. We are reconnecting our experience of wholeness, as Morrison suggests, nurturing "the chances for liberation that lie within the process" (p. 324).

Regenerative education, then, grapples to reclaim and re-aim our own further rebecoming. Our tissues and sinews of connection regrow fibril by fibril from the matrix of our pain, our denial, and our situated knowing. The creative powers awaken in the midst of this radically transforming world. Regenerative education nurtures this conscious action of restorying, regrounding, and active nurture. 

We aren't done yet, as a species or peoples. Whether through active earth hospice for the species angst and despair that opens us to remembrance of greater connectedness from which such pain springs, or via our own considerations of regenerative meta-storying, all those co-generated learning spaces can be sites of nurture. In the coming weeks I will consider some specific teaching and learning practices to embody regenerative remembrance and possibility. As the leaves up north here flare into golden leaf flame and layer into mulch, what compost can we be tending in our own hearts and hearths? What changes and shifts can we spark to sustain transformation? To nurture land connection, cultures of connection, and the sometimes long way home...

Original Montage, Marna Hauk, 03 October 21 - "Regenerative Remembrance 1 "  [Montage of Montana pond in autumn (MH, 21), aspens (MH, 21), radiant stone circle (Pexels)]

References

Eisler, Riane, & Fry, Douglas P. (2019). Nurturing our humanity: How domination and partnership shape our brains, lives, and future. Oxford.

Hogan, Linda. (1995). Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world. Norton.

Macy, Joanna, & Johnstone, Chris. (2022). Active hope: How to face the mess we're in with unexpected resilience and creative power (Rev. ed). New World Library. 

Morrison, Toni. (2019). The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations. Vintage.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Fresh Publication: The New 3 Rs in an Age of Climate Change:

The Journal of Sustainability Education has published a fresh article regarding regenerative approaches partnered with reclamation and resilience as strategies for climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE) (Hauk, 2017).

The new “Three Rs” in an Age of Climate Change: Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Possible Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education

By Marna Hauk, PhD
Cornwall Labyrinth Public Domain https://pixabay.com/en/maze-labyrinth-glendurgan-garden-511153/
Cornwall Labyrinth, Public Domain

Abstract: This thought piece proposes the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. As a changing climate becomes the larger campus of our learning, denial and top-down emergency preparedness both prove to be insufficient. We are invited into a deeper approach. Reclamation and resilience fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and patterns and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2009) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing. Reclamation, resilience, and regeneration represent ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformations. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, thriving, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence.

Keywords: environmental and sustainability education, climate change education, reclamation, resilience, regeneration, regenerative education, regenerative creativity



http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/the-new-three-rs-in-an-age-of-climate-change-reclamation-resilience-and-regeneration-as-possible-approaches-for-climate-responsive-environmental-and-sustainability-education_2017_02/

What the cross-scale parallelisms and values of resilience—psychological, socioecological, educational, and societal—reveal is that climate change realities are the larger, ongoing campus of our educational design and praxis. Rather than continuing to think of disaster against a background of normative business/weather-as-usual to which we can return, and education as happening in formal schooling, we are being invited into a more dynamic time where “the long emergency” (Kunstler, 2005) involves new levels of stamina, systems thinking, and dynamism in order to avoid mitigation-only, denial-informed attempts to “manage” climate change within normative regimes which arguably were never viable to begin with and which certainly are now being continuously disturbed.

Education must move beyond reactive modes reinforcing existing structures, including injustices (as the experience with Katrina so heavily demonstrated – Bullard & Wright, 2009). And it must move beyond militarized control strategies for emergency preparedness (Kagawa, 2010). Moving towards integrated understandings of socioecological system embedment and real-time responsiveness as well as long-term capacity building are critical.
We are invited to design education and educational systems that (1) reclaim or repair whenever possible intact or existing systems of health, connection, and vibrancy across scales (Bowers, 2009), (2) to increase resilience via networks of adaptive capacity (Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005; Goldstein, Hazy, & Lichtenstein, 2010; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008), and (3) to increase emergent co-evolutionary and socio-ecological system self-generativity, also known in complexity as autopoiesis, or more generally as regenerativity (Hauk, 2014a). Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is particularly poised to be effective in this domain because of ESE’s role in helping learners metacognize their embedment within co-constituting systems and due to ESE’s capability of connecting learners with sources of ecopsychological strength and resilience (Ingulli & Lindbloom, 2013).

Climate Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (CRESE) for Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration (3 Rs)

This paper suggests the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. These three Rs fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2011) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing.

Reclamation would be the more valuable concept in which mitigation fits – designing systems to reclaim previous capabilities and constituencies. Reclamation can involve the ark-like preservation via enclaves, sanctuaries, weather-proof libraries, living libraries, seed banks of existing materials, relationships, and systems, including of cultural lifeways via preservation or recording. Reclamation will not be possible in many cases. Reclamation represents a conserving impulse, and can also involve the restoration of the commons and commonist thinking (Kenrick, 2009). It is often helpful to reframe reclamation as distinct from the restoration of industrial approaches such as mining and extraction. Rather, reclamation signifies reclaiming more intact living systems approaches, including as those memorialized by and vibrantly alive within many living indigenous ecological knowledge systems (IEK or TEK, for example in Bowers, 2013; Cajete, 2000, 2008). Some of the emergent reclamations are sourced in innovative technologies informed by deep biomimicry (Benyus, 2002, 2014: Mathews, 2011), Zeri approaches that involve designing for multiple embedded loops emulating ecosystem dynamics (Capra, 2002; ZERI, 2015), as well as reclaiming older lifeways that are demonstrably more sustainable (Lansing, 2007). This ecoliteracy involves restoring networks, neighborhoods, and actual and adopted families of connection and care. Reclaiming carbon “energy descent” cultures of moderation and anti-consumption cultures of contraction are also relevant here (Heinberg, Sachs, & Shiva, 2008; Kagawa & Selby, 2010). The ethic of care drives reclamation. Reclamation of embeddedness within co-evolving multi-scale systems and networks helps create the foundation for the second R of Resilience.

Resilience. Resilience involves increasing adaptive capacity, and networks and scales of adaptive capacity, to increase the flexibility of the living socio-ecological systems within changing contexts. Resilient educational systems are responsive educational systems focused on capacity building and network extension (Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer, 2010). Resilience is the second R.

Panarchy is a multi-phase cyclic model for resilience that has proliferated in successfully understanding the complex adaptive cycles of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization in interlinked social and ecological systems (Berkes, Golding, & Folke, 2003). The foundations of this approach come from ecology, applying nonlinear dynamics in complex systems (Gunderson & Allen, 2010). “Resilience is described here as the property that allows the fundamental functions of an ecosystem to persist in the face of extremes of disturbance” (Allen, Gunderson, & Holling, 2010, p. 4). Holling, Peterson, and Allen (2008) clarified that “panarchies are hierarchically arranged, mutually reinforcing sets of processes that operate at different spatial and temporal scales, with all levels subject to an adaptive cycle of collapse and renewal, and with levels separated by discontinuities in key variables” (p. 3). In education, resilience theories tend to study and get applied in the study of persistent, flexible continuity across a variety of conditions, including the ability to maintain coherence when shocked. Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) have synthesized twenty sources of models, theories, capacities, strategies, descriptions, and definitions of the application of resilience across several scales, including the individual, psychological, community, city, social, ecological systemic, and physical (p. 129), in order to understand how communities might best prepare for disaster readiness. Their synthesis had compelling implications for education, and suggested that “Community resilience is a process linking a network of adaptive capacities (resources with dynamic attributes) to adaptation after a disturbance or adversity” (p. 121). They went on to emphasize how

Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities—Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence—that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns. (p. 121)

Along with these systemic and community scale applications of imagining resilience in a time of climate flux, resilience has also been applied in environmental and sustainability education in resonant ways. Sterling (2010) described a reconciliation of instrumentalist and intrinsic views of resilience in sustainability education, a way that education can simultaneously cultivate personal and social resilience in learners while teaching content and process about resilience in social-ecological systems (SES). Krasny, Tidball, and Sriskandarajah (2009) looked at social learning, resilience, and civic ecologies, how education for resilience is “learning is situated in real-world practice, and occurs through recursive interactions between individual learners and their social and biophysical environment” (p. 37). They studied how climate responsive environmental and sustainability education can itself be a constituent social catalyst for social-ecological adaptive systems capacity, whether through lake restoration, mosaicked gardens, or urban civic ecology service learning projects. As Krasny, Lindholm, and Plummer (2010) articulated:

Environmental education strategies consistent with managing for change include social learning, multiple-loop learning, reflexivity, allowing for self-organisation and other forms of participation, attention to multiple forms of knowledge and governance, and the incorporation of feedbacks or information from the social and ecological components of a system. (p. 463)

Thus, resilience as the second “R” in climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education builds emotional and psychological resilience while engaging with content and topics of resilience and while leveraging communities of embedded educators and learners in emotionally, socially, and ecologically intelligent collaborations (Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012) that build and reinforce larger networks of adaptive capacity to reduce inequities, engage communities, and enhance flexibility.
So whereas reclamation offers a way of “reading” the world and storing patterns and knowledge systems, resilience offers a way of “writing” and wiring our connective and adaptive capacity networks. Regeneration, discussed in the next section, moves beyond the keeping of reclamation and bouncing of resilience and prepares us for something we can “count” on needing: a change-philic strategy avid about transformation as the entangled social and ecological systems within which we are situated undergo massive climate shocks.

Regeneration is the third “R” of climate responsive education and can involve readying for new regimes, regenerating living capacities even if the systems themselves continue to evolve via regenerative evolution. The emphasis in regeneration has more to do with the viability and capacity of living systems even if they must flip out of their current parameters of resilience. Regenerative sustainability education leads to reconnective, multi-scale modeling and embodiment of biomimetic transformative systems (Hauk, 2011, 2014a). Thrivable or regenerative education builds skills for emergence, creativity, zooming, context, multiple perspectives, temporal dimensionality, and compassion (Hauk, 2014a, 2016; Macy & Brown, 2014 on deep time; Russell, 2013, pp. 41-51). Multiple simultaneous perspective metacognition, or polyperspectivality, is what complexity educators have termed level jumping (Davis & Sumara, 2008) and what I have elsewhere detailed as scale-slithering (Hauk, 2014a, 2016), which involves cultivating the capacity to perceive multiscales and their mutual co-generation, thus to perceive the phenomenon and also its context of arising and change, within which the learner is also embedded and with/in which the learner is also transformed and transforming:
The emergent realm of complexity thinking answers that, to make sense of the sorts of transphenomena mentioned above, one must “level-jump”—that is, simultaneously examine the phenomenon in its own right (for its particular coherence and its specific rules of behavior) and pay attention to the conditions of its emergence (e.g., the agents that come together, the contexts of their co-activity, etc.). (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 34)
Holonic, holographic, living classroom, and field-, paradigm- and pattern-sensing capacities come alive in regenerative, emergent teaching and learning (Bache, 2008; Crowell & Reid-Marr, 2013; Hauk, 2014a; Macy & Johnstone, 2012; Taylor, 2011; Wood, 2013). Regenerative, collaborative creativity (Hauk, 2014a) as a form of transdisciplinary, multi-scale, bioculturally embedded, complex collaborative emergence (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016) is a critical dimension of the third “R” of regeneration. These kinds of regenerative creativities constitute and further catalyze geometries of liberation, including the use of complex biomimetic and systems-scale ecofractals to catalyze collaborative creativity, which was shown to nurture anti-domination, ecojustice, and ethic of care orientations in learners while catalyzing collective intelligence and more regenerative designs (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2015). These multiscale polyperspectivalities and affiliated creativities can source regenerative designs, creations, and learning/cultures that respond with rather than deny climate change. Regenerative perception and understandings are powerful acts of imaginative transdisciplinary inquiry, capable of navigating the kinds of complex, multiplex, and “wicked” challenges encountered in climate shocking environmental and sustainability education (Brown, Dean, Harris, & Russell, 2010, p. 12).

Williams and Brown emphasized the role of environmental and sustainability education to fundamentally regenerate the root metaphors and mindscapes of learning toward living systems (2012, pp. 42-44). These regenerative approaches are supported by a pedagogy of transformative, transgressive learning, which can generate justice-seeking, lively, conflict-assertive praxis in reflexive social learning and capabilities, critical phenomenology, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), and de-/postcolonization theories (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015). This transformative, transgressive approach distinguishes itself from resilience-based pedagogies and directly “critiques the current tendency in sustainability science and learning to rely on resilience and adaptive capacity building and argues that in order to break with maladaptive resilience of unsustainable systems it is essential to strengthen transgressive learning and disruptive capacity-building” (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015, p. 73). Keating framed these as transformative, post-oppositional pedagogies of invitation (2013).

The Transition Movement as well as permaculture and regenerative design indicate both that the solution is in the problem (as in Holmgren, 2002) and that our responses and approaches must model the solutions we imagine (Kagawa, 2010). One of the key characteristics of regenerative systems, often viewed as more “thrivable” than sustainability constructions (Edwards, 2010; Hauk, 2014a; Russell, 2013), is the presence of disruptive, multiple and multi-scale feedback mechanisms in complex networks of emergence. These responsive, regenerative systems are beyond survival, sustainable, or resilient approaches: they are thrivable, meaning “‘anti-fragile’ and get better when disturbed” (Russell, 2010, column 4). Regeneration kicks capacity up out of flexible persistence into dynamism-proaction.

Regenerative climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (R-CRESE) involves embodying these change-active flows of neighborly social capital, school-community partnerships, citizen science and empowerment, urban food justice and food systems storage and capacity building, commonist knowledge-sharing networks, and water catchment (to name a few) in ways that not only proactively prepare and gird human-ecological networks but while doing so also further disrupt power differentials and (re)generate in amplifying feedback systems capacities that are thereby re-weaving living systems. This is exemplified by community upsurge of those traditionally marginalized, strengthening networks and community while also deepening social and political processes in contexts of scaling up community climate change organizing (Soltesova, Brown, Dayal, & Dodman, 2014, pp. 223-224). Radical regenerative approaches could include dissolution of the public school system in its current form and its regeneration in climate responsive, ecojustice-activist, community-embedded, arts-making, campusless action nodes that would regeneratively and intergenerationally design systems, build solar panels, feed and clothe communities from food forests, energize culture campaigns, provide intergenerational care, and build small-scale carbon-descent interdependence and biocultural thriving (or perhaps something even more radical that I do not have the capacity to imagine). Regeneration continuously generates, innovates, and reweaves, strengthened instead of tilted by shocks and disturbances.
Figure 1. Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Simultaneous Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (own research)
Figure 1. Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Simultaneous Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (own research)

Conclusion

Unlike other models in which components or approaches are competitive, all three Rs are requisite for our multi-system embedded survival and thrivability. As Figure 1 depicts, all three, reclamation, resilience, and regeneration, are ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformation. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence. I would be interested to hear what these three Rs spark in your own educational praxis and action; please share your ideas and comments on the JSE Facebook Page or contact me directly. In order for environmental and sustainability education to scale to increasingly complex systems, the literacies of reclamation, resilience, and regeneration can help build regenerative urban areas as “cities self-organize…where we are our most creative, collaborative, visionary, artistic, and productive” (Hemenway, 2015, p. 240) and where we can support the emergent self-organization of socio-ecological networks of thriving strengthened by the challenges ahead.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

New Edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education - And an Article on Earth Regeneration

The 2011 edition of the Journal of Sustainability Education came out this week. It features many interesting case studies, interviews, and peer-reviewed journal articles, including:
  • An academic article about Pedalogy and Pedagogy - Living Soil and Sustainability Education: "We introduce an ecologically grounded metaphoric language rooted in living soil as an alternative regenerative framework for linking sustainability pedagogy with pedology (the study of soil). Five principles that guide this relationship are presented: valuing biocultural diversity, sensitizing our senses, recognizing place, cultivating interconnection, and embracing practical experience. Nurtured within an environment of curiosity, wonder, and questioning, and set to the rhythm and scale of localized ecologies, soil serves as an embodiment of life right beneath our feet rather than the reach of distant stars. In learning gardens, living soil and pedagogy surface in dynamic ways to create an ecological landscape of sustainability education." (by Professors Dilafruz Williams and Jonathan Brown, Portland State)