Vibrant Earth - Interactive Symposium at the American Educational Research Association

Weaving as a Metaphor for
Biocultural Embedment
Photo by B. Mayer, 2016

At the recent American Educational Research Association meeting in Washington, D.C., the interactive symposium entitled "Vibrant Earth: Bioculturally Embedded Educational Encounters Catalyzing Earth Regenerative Creativities" involved dynamic experiential dimensions and international scholarship at the intersection of bioculture, ecology, and sustainability. Here was the overview description: 

Educational researchers reveal regenerative creativities sourced in Earth that promise biocultural regeneration, creative restoration, and diverse liberations. This interactive symposium draws from a rich, international, transdisciplinary synergy of research projects to generate a creative space for interchange about creative diversities sourced in earth connection. These proposals break the human/nature binary and share in the mutualism of matrixial biocultural embedment. They explore how biocultural embedment, at multiple scales, produces regenerative capacity. Through arts-based approaches, indigenous ethnographies, experiential STEM, and complexity methods, these projects suggest directions for catalyzing change. The earth itself, as the first teacher, in and through embedded learners and learning collectivities, suggests innovations for critical and creative empowerments to catalyze diverse democracies.
 Keywords: transdisciplinary, creativity, eco-restoration, arts-based research, decolonizing methods

The papers presented included

• Theorizing Earth Regenerative Creativity in Education Design – Marna Hauk, Ph.D. – Prescott College and the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies
• After Embeddedness: Dreaming Soil Ecologies Through Arts-Based Research – Barbara Bickel, Ph.D. – Southern Illinois University
• Decolonizing Development: Freeing Biocultural Diversities in Egypt to Enhance Regenerative Capacity – Abeer Salem, Ph.D. – MSA University, Cairo, Egypt
• Democratizing Mathematics via Embodied Learning and the Arts in a Teaching and Learning Garden – Susan Gerofsky, Ph.D. – University of British Columbia, Vancouver

 And we learned to make cordage and worked with weaving spring willow. Brett Mayer, a graduate student from Prescott College, helped with the symposium.

Women Empowering Climate Action Network - July 23rd Information Night and Watch "Arise the Movie" - Portland Oregon

We will share information for interested women for the WE-CAN Women Empowering Climate Action Network (www.earthregenerative.org/wecan/) upcoming year-long mentored support certificate program and social incubator for women's community climate action projects. We are currently accepting applications. 

Prospective participants, mentors, and community supporters are invited. We will watch "Arise: The Movie" which features example grassroots projects in ecofeminism action from around the world, including inspiring words from Vandana Shiva and Winona LaDuke. 

We will discuss these inspiring examples, the nature of the upcoming program, how to apply and get involved, opportunities to mentor, and inspire women's projects in community climate action. Open Q & A format too. Meet women committed to innovating projects for climate resilience and earth connection. Herbal tea will be served. All women are welcome.

More information on our Facebook event page:  https://www.facebook.com/events/477995702360970/

Portland Program WECAN - Women Empowering Climate Action Network - Fall 2015 Applications Launched

WECAN - Women Empowered for Climate Action Network, a project of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, has just made available a briefing sheet and the participant application form for the Fall 2015 program start. Priority will be given to applications that are received by June 22, 2015. 

Information sessions are planned for May and June.

Program Information

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is a local graduate institute and adult learning center based in northeast Portland offering stellar programs at the convergence of creativity, eco-restoration, and the living wisdom traditions. One project of the Institute is WE-CAN, Women Empowering Climate Action Network, which is a year-long mentored learning and action cohort to support women and queer women in incubating community-based climate change, climate action, and climate justice projects. Our circle of 8-12 visionary-activists will meet 1-2 times per month, meet once monthly with a program mentor with relevant experience, and mentors and visionary activists will all also co-learn once a month in a larger circle. Visionary-activists, who may be sparked by background or interests in an arts-based, permaculture/ gardening/ nature-loving, or ecopreneurial approach will cross-pollinate and learn more about climate justice and Gaian resilience while nurturing their visionary projects. Encounters will include a combination of project activation training, collaborative creativity engagements, climate change learning, community organizing, ecopreneurship skill-building, and the development of a plan for launching your project.

We are recruiting women visionary-activists to participate in our maiden cohort!

The cost for participating is a sliding scale from $10 to $270/month, with many partial and full scholarships available. A wide range of proposed projects will be considered, for example projects in food justice community gardening, climate murals, appropriate technology eco-businesses, women’s empowerment projects, rural-urban partnerships for permaculture resilience, etc. Use your creative powers to dream Earth’s next chapters…

Application Form for WE-CAN

Our application process allows you to gather your materials and email us your application. The types of questions include describing your project idea, providing some background information on successful projects or activities in the past, and two letters of support.

Timelines

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis with priority given if sent by June 22, 2015

Notifications will be rolling and will start being sent by August 1, 2015

The program runs from September 2015 through May 2016

We look forward to learning more about your ideas!

www.earthregenerative.org/wecan/

Climate Change Cohort Kicking Off, Slated for Fall 2015 Launch

The Institute will soon begin accepting applications for the WE-CAN program in Gaian Leadership and Climate Resilience. Please contact the Institute for application materials.

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies develops programs at the convergence of creativity, cultural and ecological restoration, and the living wisdom traditions. We are dedicated to nurturing women as leaders, facilitators, and healers through embodied, integrated action. WE-CAN is a project of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies. Supported by a training fellowship from the EE Capacity, Civic Ecology Lab, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the EPA, we are designing and unfolding the first year-long program in community climate resilience.

The WE-CAN Program year offers a dynamic, interactive learning and action context for community-based climate change resilience projects. Whether you are interested in increasing community-based organic gardening or food forests, want to bootstrap a public-benefit enterprise in transition skills, or want to increase community involvement through large puppetry or murals, We nurture Gaian thriving, in learners' growing vision, along multi-disciplinary dimensions. Our mentor match program is excellent. 

Circles of Mentors and Acceleration

• Meet regularly with the cohort with guest presenters and demonstrations
• Meet monthly with your project mentor
• Meet monthly with the entire circle of action learners and mentors
• Custom design your project inside a circle of support
• Field trips and site visits as well as intensives for immersive learning

Mentoring one-on-one and the Mentor learning circle bridges generations of successive waves of contribution, talent, and creativity. All this with the intention of creating planetary thrivability.

More information is available at the WE-CAN website. Application materials will be published later in March and will be due by May 15, 2015. 

Call for Proposals - Women in Sustainability Handbook

This call for proposals just out from Marna Hauk, Ph.D. and Denise Mitten, Ph.D.

 

Women in Sustainability are like a stellar nursery, such as the Carina Nebula. Within the emergent processes of the living universe and the generosity of the planetary unfolding, women in sustainability are interweaving ecology, equity, culture, and economics into deep, ancient, innovative, and generative forms and processes for planetary liberation. We are molten, pushing out the borders and bounds of the fields of sustainability in relational connectivity and inclusion. We are pragmatic, grounded, and embodying action. 

We seek an admixture of insight, research, clarity, story-telling, art, and inspiration from women in the fields, practice, or transdiscipline of sustainability. We want to learn from eco-artist mavericks, women in sustainable science, women in collective endeavor; current day success stories; intersectional sustainabilities and sustainable solidarities; ecofeminist, matrixial, and material feminist sustainabilities; journeys into ancient, generative mother-cultures; group-authored visionaries breathing into the labor pains of the current era; love notes to the future. Articles, poems and brief writings, and a “recipes of sustainability” section including self-sustaining as well as mothering sustainable cultures. 

Send your 1-3 page chapter proposal with brief bio and CV by February 1, 2015
Email your chapter proposals or drafts to womeninsustainability at gmail -dot- com by May 1, 2015
This call is also available at: http://www.eartheregenerative.org/wish/

Climate Change Action - Catalyzing Community Engagement: We Can with the WE-CAN Program

Inspired by the idea that our communities are already well-resourced with brilliance, determination, and creativity, the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is innovating a certificate program to catalyze community-based climate resilience. The first cohort, targeted for a Fall 2015 start, will bring together a dozen women, including queer women, in an activist, experiential learning cohort to engage in mentored projects for climate change, climate action, and climate justice. The program is envisioned as a cross-collaboration of arts-based activists, ecopreneurs, and permaculture - regenerative designers. 

The program in Women Empowering Climate Action Network (or WE-CAN) will feature research-based and culturally responsive vibrant practices for learning and collaboration, including regenerative creativity inspired by biomimicry and fractal patterns from nature and bioculture as well as sustainability education, complex living systems, and ecoliteracy combined with approaches for environmental justice. Cohort members will also study and practice agile project management and collaborative leadership. The project hopes to nurture each learner with a project mentor, internships, and accelerator-style resources and micro-investments in project start-up. The Pacific Northwest women's community will be an amazing hothouse of support and social incubation for these practical visionaries.


We are currently soliciting project mentors, potential partners, internship sites, investors, and supporters, as well as prospective cohort participants. This program has already been honored with a training fellowship in community climate change action from the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab, EE Capacity, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the EPA.

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is a learning organization for Gaian thriving at the intersection of creativity, ecological restoration, and the living wisdom traditions in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion. The living Earth system is our first teacher.

We look forward to collaborating with you to bring this and other amazing projects to life here in the heart of Cascadia. 
 

Incubating Social Creativity and Regenerative Creativity

T. Fisher photo of Stancell's Mural "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest"

The fields of social learning and social incubators are cultivating, I would suggest, the endeavor of incubating social creativity.

Social Learning. Wals and Leij (2007) in their prefatory remarks to a book on the topic of social learning and sustainability education (free downloadable ebook available) point out the spectrum of meaning for social learning --  from learning among deeply socially contexted inviduals to focusing on the learning processes of 'social aggregates' (pp. 19-20). They suggest that social learning involves facilitating dynamic contexts for richly socially contexted, diverse groups to engage with sustainability challenges along this spectrum. Complexivists have referred to this as extending the locus of learning to the learning community [and not (only) the individual] (Davis & Sumara, 2006) or as the learning of collective beings (Minati & Pessa, 2006). Sterling (in the 2007 volume linked above) imagines a "connective cultural consciousness" in which sustainability social learning can help cultures "ride the storm" of climate change by undertaking radical social learning at the scale of paradigm change.

Granted, these ideas of social collectives are not actually novel. To note, elder cultures (such as those featured by Bowers' scholarship on the learning commons and traditional cultures) have long understood that learning communities offer a deep connection, empowerment, and nurture than individuals operating in isolation or even individuals collaborating.  Educational theory is still catching up.

At the same time that learning theory is learning to jump scales and study aggregates, enterprise theory and incubation of entrepreneurship (and ecopreneurship even) is undergoing a similar shift from rugged individualism to .... social incubators.


Social Incubators. Social media, crowdfunding, honoring social good and values-infused endeavor, and open-sourcing as well as increasingly accessible organizational infrastructure through internet technologies have radically opened the field of enterprise innovation. The idea of separate "enterprises" are themselves melting as densely interconnected networks of creatives and service brocades transfigure entrepreneurship. The rise of social enterprise incubators (also these examples) and the generosity economy all reflect a parallel to the shift described in educational theorizing toward attending to the social dimensions of learning and social learning. 


Incubating Social Creativity. Without falling into the western tendency to reify the new (as is often the case in unconscious neophilia), the social evolution of our species involves attending to complex emergence. Our culture is evolving to attend to emergence, autopoiesis, and self-organization as signs of complex innovation and novelty.  Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein (2010) propose complexity-informed strategies for facilitating ecologies of innovation. 

Attending to innovation in a deep sense means attending to creativity. Csiksentmilhalyi (1999) noticed how the systems of field and culture contexted and vetted individual creativity. R. Keith Sawyer (2010) takes off from jazz improvisation to develop a complexity-informed social creativity called collaborative emergence. In collaborative emergence, creative collaborations by groups of people spark emergent phenomena at the group scale. Ecologies of innovation extend this emergent process to locality and cultural scales, even innovating public services (for example in Peterborough). At the scale of locality and neighborhood, the Transition Town movement exemplifies this shift; City Repair and Placemaking serves as another beacon. Social creativity has been credited with rapidly accelerating software innovation (Granof, 2013). Many other theorists have also explored social creativity (including John-Steiner, 2000 and Sawyer, 2008). Social as a descriptor in social creativity can function in two ways, either to convey that the phenomena is generated by social aggregate or that it is geared toward social good.

Researching Incubating Social Creativity. My original mixed methods research is surfacing methods and means for catalyzing social creativity. I research the "social" in creativity across both dimensions of meaning of social: (1) that it is generated by groups and systems of creativity and (2) that it has an intention toward social good, in this case sustainability and regeneration.

I am studying how to incubate multi-scale creativity. By generating processes, habits of curiosity, and cultures of individual and small group creative processes as well as setting up learning cultures favoring social creativity, we can facilitate and encourage the underlying practices, habits, and cultural matrix to nurture social creativity.

The research is surfacing how creativity, the seedbed for innovation and personal and cultural flourishing, can be sourced in nature and bioculture and aligned with increasing the integrity of culture, place and planet. This regenerative creativity emerges at multiple scales and produces empathy, connection, and earth-aligned action. Incubating social creativity catalyzed by ecofractal patterns from nature and bioculture develops what Bowers (2012) calls ecological intelligence and what Goleman, Bennett & Barlow (2012) name ecoliteracy, an emotionally and socially engaged ecological intelligence.  I would suggest that to incubate this kind of regenerative cultural and social creativity can source shifts not only in social learning and social enterprise, but also in multiple other domains and transdisciplines as part of the enlarging and interconnecting tapestry of cultural regeneration beyond sustainability to thriving.

In the coming months we will be sharing snapshots of the emergent findings from this research.

Resources

• Bowers, C. A. (2012). The challenge facing educational reformers: Making the transition from individual to ecological intelligence in an era of climate change. In D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), How dogmatic beliefs harm creativity and higher-level thinking (pp. 112-122). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
• City Repair. (2013). Website. Retrieved from http://www.cityrepair.org
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. New York, NY:
  Cambridge University Press.
• Dawson, J. (2012). Building an economy on gift and generosity [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/blog/building-an-economy-on-gift-and-generosity-jonatha-dawson
• Goldstein, J., Hazy, J. K., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (2010). Complexity and the nexus of leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Goleman, D., Bennett, L., & Barlow, Z. (2012). Ecoliterate: How educators are cultivating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass and the Center for Ecoliteracy.
• Granof, P. (2013, October 9). Social creativity: The engine of software development [Blog post]. Wired - Innovation Insights. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/social-creativity-the-engine-of-software-development-in-the-social-era/
• Sawyer, R. K. (2008). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic. 
• Sawyer, R. K. (2010). Individual and group creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 366-380). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Stancell, P. Mural of "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." On Wikimedia Commons. Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts Program.
• Transition Network. (2013). Website.  Retrieved from http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
• Wals, A. E. J. (Ed.). (2007). Social learning towards a sustainable world: Principles, perspectives, and praxis. Pays-Bas: Wageningen Academic Publishers. Retrieved from the publisher at http://www.wageningenacademic.com/sociallearning 

Image Credit: 

Photograph by Tom Fischer, 2009, of a Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia. Mural Artist is Parris Stancell, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts program. Photo Creative Commons 2. Left to right: Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass. The quote above the mural is from Ella Baker, a founder of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a civil rights group that helped to coordinate "Freedom Rides" in the early 1960's (from Wikimedia Commons).