2023-07-24 on the EDE course session from 2023-07-15
I was absent again from the EDE course, this time travelling in the South of England with my youngest daughter. As part of our trip we visited The Eden Project in Cornwall, which is pretty relevant to the ecological perspective!
So here is a summary of the key points that I saw in the recording, and as I did last month for Exploring Community Economies I'm adding some further comment and reflection of my own.
For more information about Daniel see:
Daniel has an interesting background, with science/engineering as a basis, then to the whole area of psychology, and then intentional communities (of course including ecovillages!) This puts him in a great position to serve as one of the bridges between the more academic, scientific side of life, and community. (I like to serve as another arch in those bridges.)
Daniel introduced us to the history of Ecovillage Education, 1978 to the present, with which he has been closely involved, at Findhorn and elsewhere. It's a curious history, with several initiatives that didn't quite take hold, or didn't last long. Daniel has initiated and advocated for research and education partnerships between ecovillages and local universities, such as was set up with Ithaca College; or partnerships based on geographical proximity, such as between the Sirius community (where Daniel is a past and future member) and UMass Amherst. Daniel has been instrumental in the development of EDE courses, and is highly experienced in the various educational initiatives of many ecovillages worldwide.
Daniel made the point very clearly that universities (and other experts) are experts in small, siloed fields of study, and can therefore probably get deeper into any one particular area; but on the other hand, ecovillages and other communities are living laboratories exploring what is humanly possible when the silos are broken down and the full complexity of real-life emerges – when all the parts are put together. He poses the question: “How do we create human-scale communities?” with the related questions: What is culture? What stories do we tell, about who we are as humans, and more particularly, humans sharing more of living together than is currently normal in our culture?
For me, the idea of partnership between ecovillage and university also points to a fundamental question: “Who is doing the studying, what is being studied, and why?”
Research in existing universities has a well-established agenda, based around writing papers and getting research funding. They do the studying, and they study what can be funded, or occasionally what is motivated by pure curiosity. It would be easy for a researcher from a university to try to observe a community from outside, but that clearly has its limitations, as has been amply demonstrated in social anthropology. Additionally, whether technical or social, academic research needs to have a grounding in one or more literatures, and that tends to limit the scope of orthodox academic research in investigating completely new fields.
On the other hand, ecovillages have needs for advancing practical knowledge. These research areas may not be so appealing to academics, but may sometimes be funded by other bodies. On the technical side, we have heard of other places where an ecovillage is being used to test or try out technology; while on the social side of community life, established academic knowledge is particularly lacking.
Daniel expounded some of the fairly obvious and well-known distinctions between academic education and ecovillage-centred education. This is, of course, unfair to the more forward-looking, experimental trends in academic education. The contrast between this common, uninspired view of academic education and the vision of education as we would like to see it goes like this:
Ecovillages, Daniel points out, are “trying to find sustainable pathways”. It's not that academia is bad, or ill-intentioned, but when establishment institutions do research into alternatives, they are rarely able to practice what they preach. One comment on this was that educational experimentation can be attempting to bridge between existing academia and the real world as we understand it.
As an aside, Daniel said little about education in personal growth, psychology etc. Surely these topics need to be introduced into ecovillage courses, and not just teaching about them, but introducing people to the practice of them. More of this below.
Daniel has also contributed greatly to setting out the subject matter, or curriculum, of ecovillage education, not just its form. He helped to create what GEN/Gaia call the “mandala”, with the four quadrants of social; economic; ecological; and worldview (though other words are sometimes used as well). There are many other circular diagrams of the important topics in our world, and the mandala itself has been developed in several different versions. Daniel has elaborated his own rich “Story Map”, which he sees as having the potential for supporting (words quoted from the session)…
“A tagging system … where you tag yourself and try to find other people with similar interests. And it's always difficult. Someone will put a plural on something or something slightly different. This is at least giving some sort of coherence to that … I actually have a vision of working with this with Spiral Dynamics … Different ways of making meaning … ”
The whole point leading to the question: can something like this …
“Help people come back and find their core story? What is it that drives everything you are doing?”
On a personal note, I have seen several different, varied attempts to classify the subject matter of ecovillage education. The fact that they are all different is no surprise to me, as the subject matter is inherently complex, and we all have our own peculiar ways of making sense of this complexity. To have an effective ‘tagging’ system, we need to get beyond trying to have a one-size-fits-all tree, and go with something more fluid. I am developing this, and hope to introduce it to GEN, IC.org and others, as a more effective way of finding other people to start ecovillages (etc.) with.
Mugove was calling in from Zimbabwe, and he has worked in several countries around present-day Zambia. He is the driving force behind the Seeding Schools organisation, whose remarkable work includes integrating permaculture principles into African schools, providing them with growing food on their doorsteps.
Schools are vital institutions in many parts of Africa, as they are natural community centres, and, through the education they provide, schools can act as seeds for new ways of living, and new economic models. Immediately I should say that many of these ideas are not really new, but they run counter to the dominant colonial narratives that have tended to erase traditional indigenous knowledge and replace it, too often with a mechanistic approach focused on classrooms and passing examinations in subjects that are more relevant to Western societies. Subjects from the western, developed world curriculum can also be useful, but need to be set in the context of the local culture and environment, as with any permaculture-inspired approach. Sadly, schools have often been the entry point for the dominant colonial culture to be telling people about a supposedly ‘more civilized’ way of living, which is so often blinkered and short-sighted. Seeding Schools is one great initiative aimed at turning this around, integrating the best of both worlds.
Schools may well have to deal with hunger and malnutrition, which is why integrating food production into the immediate surrounds of a school is such a useful idea.
Possible entry points for learning in these schools include:
A keystone to the transformation of the immediate surrounds into food production is what they call “Integrated Land Use Design” (ILUD). This is a tool for facilitating the planning and implementation of improved land use, with a step-by-step participatory design process; taking a whole school approach (all stakeholders and all the land) to create functional and edible landscaping. It involves
This approach is not without its challenges. These include:
The project has learned a lot about
Hopefully all this experience and knowledge can be disseminated widely throughout the whole region. A living example is the best teacher.
This work started in mid 90s in Zimbabwe; by 2007 it was being set up in Malawi. Previously, colonists had been saying that the older ways were the ‘wrong’ approach to agriculture. Apparently, the right way of doing things was to have neat rows of maize. When Mugove came across permaculture, he recognised that permacluture was the answer. Putting it into practice, the children were enthusiastic, and were able to convince their elders, hence demonstrating the power of schools as potential agents of change.
This has partly been worked out in the context of the Education design group, so thanks to them.
We have heard a lot about education about ecovillages, and I don't think I was alone in being slightly disappointed that we didn't hear much about education within ecovillages — both education of ecovillage children, and lifelong learning within ecovillages. That is, education of the ecovillagers, rather than outsiders. To some extent, this is mirrored in the EDE course itself. Near the start, we were introduced, in the “Social Dimension”, to ideas such as Dragon Dreaming, which has several useful pointers. But how can this be brought to life as learning about what is going on right here and now, for instance in the project groups, just as, in the wider world of ecovillages, how can this awareness, this reflection, be genuinely present and effective in day-to-day community life?
And this seems important to me. Why? Because my experience leads me to believe that many instances of ecovillages and other intentional communities failing to live up to hopes or expectations, or breaking up, or not even ever getting off the ground, is due to a lack of something in the members, would-be members, or participants. What is that something? Is it some personality characteristics? Maybe, but I believe that, whatever it is, it can be learned and improved. Is it a skill, then? In a way, I would say, yes, it is a collection of skills. Is it something to do with personal values? Yes, something … and one's personal values are not set in stone. They can develop, and this is something that needs to be learned and allowed for by others. And, personal values don't exist in a vacuum. They are tightly connected to the culture in which a person lives and is brought up. The concept of “enculturation” is significant.
The impression I get is that, to a great extent, learning within ecovillages is too often seen simply as something that happens, rather than something that is planned. This may be due to a reaction against planned teaching, and the kinds of negative experiences people had in their own institutional education. However, this is certainly not universally true. Whereas in some ecovillages, children are simply sent out to the normal educational establishments, in Tamera for example they have their own carefully designed and planned school. Other ecovillages either educate their own children, or support home education in other ways.
For adults, however, I have not seen any substantial curriculum for the kinds of learning that can be, if not expected, then at least hoped for among the members. I have experienced, in the Life Itself hub in Bergerac, a month-long residency based around Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and the Internal Family Systems Model (IFS). But to me, the curriculum is wider than just one or two of these approaches. To me, education for ecovillages should include, one way or another, sooner or later, topics covering the general area of these (without necessarily dividing them in this way—they overlap in any case):
These need to be learned not just as theoretical topics, but practically through experience; and people's natural or spontaneously acquired abilities vary enormously, so learning needs to be tailored to individuals – yet again, one size does not fit all.
One vital aid to this kind of learning will be some kind of aid to self-assessment around where one stands oneself along these lines of development. A very well-designed self-assessment scheme should help people assess themselves accurately, avoiding the Dunning–Kruger effect. However, it may be more accurate to blend self-assessment with peer assessment, particularly in relationship to social skills. This might be a very significant help with Neurodiversity.
When setting up this kind of self-assessment process, it is absolutely essential to avoid the kind of cultural bias that has plagued education as described above. The challenge here is to undo the colonialist fiction or superiority, and properly validate and esteem traditional and indigenous wisdom, often built up in context over many generations; alongside the more instrumental, technical and scientific paradigms.
Note that this is not a criticism of the current EDE course, because I cannot realistically see a substantial amount of this kind of learning happening in the short time, and the context of the course. What I do see is incredible potential when this learning is integrated with the other aspects already present in the EDE course. Knowledge by itself is not enough, we know that. It's practice; it's relationship; it is finding that regenerative potential both in each one of us as individuals, and in us collectively. That is surely in tune with Ecovillage Design Education.