Ecovillage education

2023-05-20

The online Ecovillage Design Education course (EDE) that is ongoing as I write (it started around the beginning of March and ended in late July) has small “design groups”, and I've chosen to be in the one focused around education. It's a friendly little group, and we are making progress towards agreeing what we are aiming to produce as our output to submit to the course. As I was lying in bed this morning, I was reflecting on the experiences and thoughts that have been shared in the group, and this came together in me as a thought about what we could be doing. I'm expressing the idea here, but it is really the result of the whole group reflection, not just mine.

What I hear is that all of us in the group think that conventional education is far from ideal. We have different experiences, of course, and that leads to different visions of what would be ideal for education, but we are all on the EDE course together and that points us to focusing on the aspects of education that related to ecovillages. That is still very broad, but leads me to formulate a question: what are the principles of education that align not only with our ideals, coming from our experiences, but also with the subject matter of the course itself?

So, here is what I imagine could be an outline plan of the core of our output.

1. Assemble some ideals and principles for education, related to ecovillages
   1. what emerges from our stories?
   2. what principles can we extract from the EDE course itself?
   3. what can we learn from the history of education?
   4. what can we reuse from previously stated ideals?
   5. what other sources of explicit principles are there?
2. How are these ideals and principles reflected, or not, in
   1. courses offered by ecovillages
   2. children's education within ecovillages
   3. the continuing education of adult members of ecovillages
   4. the EDE course itself?

We can work in parts of our personal stories to this.

Then, I hope, on this basis we may be able to offer some concrete suggestions or proposals. For instance:

• can we envisage any improvements to the (already excellent) EDE course?
• what other ways are there of learning about ecovillages?
• what do we see as good ways of organising children's education, in ecovillages and beyond?
• what could be a curriculum for adult learning, for members within an ecovillage, or for people preparing themselves to join an ecovillage?
  • (I've explored this later, on 2023-07-24.)

• EDE
• intentional community