Re-imagining education for adaptation
Keynote lecture for the KAUST Winter Enrichment Program
Dear beloved readers,
It has been a while! Mid-December through now has given me much to write, think, and share about, but my creative energy has been poured into this keynote lecture I just delivered at the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST)’s Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) in Saudi Arabia, which I would like to share with you today.
KAUST, as implied by its name, is a science and technology graduate school, which also has an interdisciplinary program in the winter term that brings in speakers from around the world to share ideas around a specific theme. This year’s theme was Adaptation, and I was invited to speak at the intersection of education and adaptation. What follows, in video and written form, is what I offered. The video also has 15 minutes of Q&A with the audience that are not included in the script.
In whatever form you engage with it, I’d love to hear you thoughts!
With love and care in the spirit of planetary flourishing,
Stephanie
Re-magining Education for Adaptation: Educating for Planetary Flourishing
I am so happy and honored to be here with you today to talk about re-imagining education for adaptation, which I would like to frame as educating for futures of planetary flourishing planetary. I want to start by asking you a question: what do you love about being alive on the earth in this moment? What is something that recently gave you a sense of wonder or awe, or enchantment? I invite you to bring something to mind and present with you in this space.
I have to tell you: this is a picture of the view from my home in Costa Rica, where I currently live and teach. Last week, a group of visiting students asked me where my favorite place I’d traveled was, and I said “Everywhere!” and I truly meant it. Everywhere – from my small town in Costa Rica to the skyscrapers of Tokyo to a mud hut in rural Niger - has my favorite, and I have seen incredible beauty in all of the places around the world that I have had the good fortune to visit. With each place I visit, I fall in love with the world even more, and now I have Saudi Arabia to add to my list of favorites, and I want to thank you for welcoming me to your beautiful country which, in just a short time, has given me more reasons to love the world.
If we want to address the pressing socio-ecological crises of our time, our love for the world is where we need to start. This is something I learned from teacher Joanna Macy, whose body of work is called The Work That Reconnects. When we love something, we want to care for it and protect it, and if we start from gratitude and love, this will motivate us to take right action. So I invite us today to begin here - with our love for the world, and our sense of wonder and amazement for being alive.
I am so honored to be here with you today to talk about re-imagining education for adaptation. In beginning with gratitude, I want to thank the organizers of this Winter Enrichment Program, especially WEP chair Professor Deanna Lacoste and the amazing WEP team, for inviting me, and for choosing to place a discussion around education right at the start of the program, because this highlights the important and necessary role that rethinking education has in reshaping the world.
Education makes the world - it doesn’t make it alone, but it is world-making in the sense that what we educate about, and how we educate, has a significant effect on what the world becomes, or in the words of humane educator Zoe Weil, “The world becomes what we teach,” and I would add the world also becomes how we teach - that the methods and relationships within our educational structures teach as much as the content. We need to consider the kind of world we are making through our educational systems, and the kind of world we want to make together.
The field of peace education, my disciplinary and vocational home, proposes that education should be oriented towards making a more peaceful world. The Earth Charter describes peace as the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which we are a part.” If we want to see a more peaceful world, we need to educate for it, and we need to understand the ways that education has contributed to violence, and how it can contribute towards more peaceful relationships at all levels. We also need our teaching methods and the structures we teach within to be aligned with this goal.
Education touches and affects us all, both directly and indirectly. I understand that many of you are students, some of you are faculty, and parents of school-age children, and that many of you are scientists and engineers. No matter your role, we all have a stake in education, which is why I believe re-imagining education needs all of us. The world also desperately needs scientists, technologists, and engineers who are peacebuilders, using their skills and expertise to design and create with collective well-being in mind. I am so glad you are all here!
And I had no idea how relevant this topic would be to you! I was blown away by the Slido results from last night’s opening ceremony, which placed education front as the area most needing improvement when we think about adaptation. I will be sharing some of my ideas about this in this talk, and I really look forward to hearing yours.
Education is also an inherently hopeful endeavor. Implicit in the notion of learning is the belief that we can change, can grow, can transform- and that the world can change, too. So I’d love to begin from this place of possibility: that inherent in the idea of re-imagining education is the sense that the world can be different, and that we can shape it together, and that our educational structures and systems have an important role to play in this shaping.
I invite us to enter an inquiry together into the role education has played in getting us to this moment of planetary crisis, and the role it has to play in transforming it and helping us reach beyond it. I might leave you with more questions than answers, and I hope that you leave with a lot to think about and some things that might be useful to you.
One thing I want to say upfront: you are the experts of your context, and I know very little about education here, so when I talk about education, I am speaking about education broadly. One of the key themes I want to highlight today is that education for adaptation has to be contextual and locally rooted: it has to be relevant and accountable to the local context while situating the local within the broader planetary context.
Some of the questions I am inviting us to explore together today in this inquiry are:
● How has education contributed to getting us to this moment of intersecting global crises?
● When we say adaptation, what are we adapting to?
● What is the role of education in adaptation and reaching beyond it?
The basic thesis of my talk, just to tell you up front, is that the root causes of our current collective crises are separation and disconnection, and education for adaptation must help us remember our interconnectedness with each other and to all of life, and from this place, we will find ways to adapt to our current realities and also reach beyond them. We need to transform in order to adapt, and we also need to continue dreaming of futures of more justice, equality, flourishing, and thriving for all of life. Our dreams, imagination, and creativity are some of the most important resources we have to help us reach beyond current conditions and towards a world where we can all thrive. Because a world where all of life flourishes is possible, and education has a key role to play in helping us move towards this world.
Time travel: Making the future present
We started with love, and now we are going to step into the future, because the future is already present. If education is worldmaking, we need to imagine the world we are educating towards. Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” The future is already present in this very moment. The question becomes: what kind of future do we want to live into? And what can we do now to bring that future to life, when it is already alive in us? To re-imagine education, we have to start with the future we long for, which is already here in this moment in both our imaginations and our actions. I’d like to begin with a little exercise in time travel. I know - this might sound weird or uncomfortable - though I propose that sitting with discomfort is a core capacity for educating for thriving planetary futures.
I invite you to take a deep breath and close your eyes if you feel comfortable, or you can just soften your gaze. Imagine with this breath you are transported thirty years into the future - 2056. This isn’t the future of business as usual - this is the future in which humanity has gotten our collective act together, we have solved our current crises, and we are living in greater harmony with each other and the earth. In short, we have adapted. This isn’t a utopia where everything is permanently fixed - we have come to realize that it is an ongoing dance of living in harmony and balance, of ongoing repair, healing, and regeneration. But we have figured out how to create systems and ways of living in which we can weave relationships and repair when harm happens, when we can come back into balance when we have fallen out of it, when we return to alignment, where humanity has become a beneficial species to life on earth. Notice: what does this future look like? What do you see? What does it feel like to be in it? What does education look like in this future? And what is the kind of education that got us here? Take a few moments to look around.
OK, you can take a deep breath and return to the present moment, releasing the vision but bringing it back with you - I know, it might be hard to come back. And if it was hard to imagine, that is OK too - when I do this exercise in classes, I usually ease people into it, and do some warming up, but for our the sake of time today I wanted us to drive right in, because I believe we need to have this vision in mind - to imagine that other worlds are possible, and that a future where all of life is thriving is possible, and it is our responsiblity and duty to imagine ourselves into this future, and education has an essential role to play in getting us there.
I’d like to invite you to take just two minutes to share with a neighbor what you saw in this future. Because the beautiful thing about this future is that none of us can see all of it - we actually need each other’s imaginations, and we need to put our ideas together to have a more complete vision of the future we need to be moving towards, what writer and activist adrienne maree brown calls imagination collaboration.
I’d like us to imagine that a better future is here with us today, alive in each one of us, waiting to be born. I have done this exercise many times with many groups all over the world, and I would say while often technology has a role to play in the future visions that appear, the most common recurring theme I notice is seeing a green future, with humans living in harmony with nature.
So with our love for the world and a flourishing future in mind, I invite us to return to the present moment, and explore where we are and what has been education’s role in getting us here.
The present moment: Education’s role in the meta-crisis/consequence
We are living in a moment of intersecting, interrelated, and compounding global crises, what some have called the metacrisis marked by global climate chaos, economic shocks, health crises, and political turmoil and conflict. The metacrisis has also been called the meta-consequence by a group called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective - meaning the crises we are experiencing are the logical outcome of centuries-old unsustainable systems built on violence, hierarchy, inequality, and separation. There are many ways to name and articulate this moment, but for the purposes of this talk, I am going to use the language of metacrisis as the frame, but I want us to keep this idea of consequence in mind.
This isn’t to say the present moment is all bad- of course, we have made enormous progress in many fields, including science and technology, but up until now, the innovation has come at a cost of human and ecological destruction, so we have to ask ourselves if there is another way (spoiler: there has to be!).
If we see education as a worldmaking endeavor, then we have to reckon with the fact that education has contributed to making the world as it is now, resulting in the metacrisis. Education, in part, got us here - it is not solely to blame - though society loves to blame teachers for everything, a little joke for the educators in the crowd!) - but we have to reckon with education’s contribution, because the world has never been more “educated” than it is right now, and yet we find ourselves in the midst of planetary social-ecological collapse.
Along these lines, I have been thinking of a book that psychologist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura co-authored in 1991 called “We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy - and the world is getting worse.” In the book, Hillman and Ventura call into question the nature of Western psychotherapy, which tends to isolate problems to the individual psyche rather than seeing them as connected with the wider world in which we are situated. They critique the way psychology has individualized problems that are collective in nature, and part of their call is to re-root psychology in the world.
We can raise similar questions and make similar critiques about modern education. The world is more educated than it has ever been - more and more people going through formal schooling, more people with advanced degrees- and yet, the world is “getting worse” by many measures - particularly in terms of unsustainability, inequality, and violence. Education as we know it has not led to a world of greater sustainability, equality, or justice, or peace - quite the opposite. As such, we should view our current crises as an educational crisis, because if the world has never been more educated, and it has led us to this point of destruction of life, then we really need to question how we are educating and what we are educating towards, and what has been missing in our education.
If the world becomes what we teach, as I shared earlier, then we have to ask: what have we been teaching - and not teaching - that has contributed to getting us into this mess?
Modern education as it presently exists is designed to uphold and get people to fit into the present systems - systems that are based in separation that leads to domination, exploitation, and hierarchy, vast inequality and ecological collapse. In his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (originally published in 1968) Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote:
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
Modern formal schooling largely contributes to upholding the status quo and inviting the younger generation to conform to it through what Freire calls the banking model of education, in which students are seen as empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge of the teacher, only to repeat it. Education enacted in this way becomes a form of domination, and does not teach students to participate actively and creatively in their world; it rather teaches them to replicate the world as it is. It lacks critical thinking and creativity - two of the most essential skills and dispositions needed for viable futures to be possible.
Echoing Hillman and Ventura’s critique of psychotherapy, modern education often sustains a paradigm of separation— disconnected from life. The metacrisis is therefore an educational crisis, and at heart a relational one. By centering the isolated individual, splitting knowledge into silos, and detaching learning from place and community, schooling teaches the myth of separateness—and that myth cascades into hierarchy, domination, exploitation, and violence. When education is cut off from life, we also learn a false sense of humanity’s place in the web of life. The good news is that if separation is learned, it can be unlearned.
Modern education is also oriented towards getting students to fit within the logic of exponential growth-oriented capitalism, in which the focus of education has become contributing to infinite economic expansion. But we live on a finite planet - an abundant planet that can support a lot of life and full of near-limitless possibilities, but one that cannot sustain unlimited consumption and extraction. There are limits to growth, but our global economic system and relations do not reflect or honor these limits. Modern education largely promotes conformity to this system that is causing massive social and ecological destruction. The end goal of modern education is to get a good job in current economic systems which are exploitative and damaging our planetary home. To survive within these systems, many of the best-paying jobs are engaged in extraction and exploitation.
I would also argue that our education/relational crisis is not an informational crisis. When I entered the field of peace education, I believed that we just lacked information, and if we just had the correct information and understanding, and taught the right things in schools, then the world would be different. While to some extent this is true, information alone has not been enough. Take the climate crisis for example: we have had the facts and figures about climate change for decades. What we have lacked is the collective will to make change; the ethical responsibility towards each other and the planet; and the understanding of our interconnectedness which might push us to act differently - to act as if we belong to each other and the planet.
Information alone is not enough, and rational and intellectual understanding alone is not enough. We need to educate minds and hearts. Modern formal education also tends to focus on one way of knowing - the intellectual, the rational, the written word - while at best ignoring and often devaluing and erasing other ways of knowing such as social-emotional, land-based, traditional, and embodied knowledges. This pattern of overvaluing one way of knowing over others is called epistemic violence and epistemic injustice by decolonial scholars. This is not to say intellectual understanding is not important, but it is to acknowledge its limitations as one way of knowing.
To summarize, education has contributed to the metacrisis by perpetuating a paradigm of separation through promoting individualism and anthropocentrism, requiring students to fit into an economic system rooted in exponential growth on a finite planet, and overvaluing one form of knowledge over others. Now let us look at what we are adapting to, and what education could and should be for otherwise.
What are we adapting to?
The metacrisis/metaconsequence requires us to consider how we adapt to current conditions and a rapidly changing and unpredictable future. Adaptation is not optional - it is essential - and there is much we need to transform in order to adapt. In thinking about education for adaptation, I began to wonder: do we really want to adapt to anything right now? Adaptation seems to imply acceptance, which I don’t think is what we are going for. We don’t want to equate adaptation with settling for or accepting the status quo. Yes, we need to adapt to the world as it is - we need to adapt to finite planetary systems, for example. However, I don’t want us to equate adaptation to accepting inequality, injustice, or unsustainability. We should not settle for the status quo as it is or conform to its logic. We should not adapt to current realities and just leave it there. Re-imagining education for adaptation invites us to reach beyond it towards the transformation of these systems.
When I ask myself the question: what are we adapting to? Succinctly, I believe what we need to adapt to are planetary limits and the laws of nature. Ecologically speaking, we live on an abundant yet finite planet, and many of our educational systems are currently oriented around the idea of infinite economic growth, either implicitly or explicitly. We also need to adapt to our place in the world as a species, of decentering humanity, unlearning anthropocentrism, and placing ourselves, in the words of poet Mary Oliver, in the family of all things, as a regenerative part of the earth’s living metabolism.
We are also adapting to a world that is vastly interconnected, and increasingly so. The interconnectedness is not new - we always have been; we are just more aware of our interconnectedness than ever due to technological advancements and communication. We are more connected with the events in other regions than we ever have been. And events like climate disruption and the global COVID-19 pandemic have helped us feel this in ways we have not been as aware of. We are also able to forge relationships and friendships in ways we have not been able to, and foster greater intercultural understanding. (But understanding isn’t a given - our vast interconnectedness can also lead to greater misunderstanding and conflict if we do not engage with openness, awareness, and humility, which is where education also has an important role to play).
Educating for planetary limits might sound stifling and uninspiring. However, limits can inspire creativity. I am sure many of you are familiar with working within constraints - of a specific location, or given specific materials or a budget. If you are an artist or writer, sometimes having unlimited possibilities, like a blank page or a blank canvas, can be daunting, but using a limit - a canvas size for a painting, or forcing yourself to use several specific random words as a writer - can inspire creativity. In this sense, education for adaptation is an invitation for us to lean into the creative possibilities of learning to live within our planetary boundaries, and that these constraints can inspire innovation. While the planet has limits we need to honor, the possibilities are nearly endless for how we might shape a more livable future.
What is the role of education in adaptation and reaching beyond it?
This brings us to my final question for today of what education should be for, education’s role in adaptation, and the idea of the metacrisis as meta-possibility. In this moment of planetary unraveling, crisis, and collapse, we have an opportunity to come together, to collaborate like never before, to repair and heal from past harms, and to design systems that work for all of us and the planet. Is it possible for the metacrisis to become an opportunity to re-imagine the world otherwise? And how might education help get us there?
I put possibility with a BIG question mark there because I do not want to diminish or side-step the painful realities of the metacrisis/consequence. Journalist Naomi Klein, who wrote the book The Shock Doctrine, coined the term “disaster capitalism” to describe how some in power have taken advantage of crises and even manufactured them in order to push forward economic policies that benefit a very small, wealthy segment of global society. There is a way that the metacrisis can be exploited for greater personal gain - for example, the wealth consolidation we saw among global elites during the pandemic. But might this moment alternatively be a chance of coming together to solve these crises in equitable ways never seen before, in ways that allow for all of us and the earth to thrive and flourish?
If education makes the world, and it has made the world as we know it, how can we re-imagine education to adapt to honoring planetary limits? If we return to our initial visions of a future where all of life thrives, how can we reimagine education to contribute towards making that world? Here is a non-exhaustive list of ideas to get us started - but I will eagerly await your contributions as well.
To begin, re-imagining education for adaptation needs to put life at the center of learning. It needs to re-orient education towards serving life, rooting it in the interconnectedness with all of life. With relationality as the foundation, everything else springs forth. For those of us who have already been taught to conform to existing systems, we have a lot of unlearning to do: unlearning separation, hierarchy, domination, and supremacy. If we place life at the center, this will change everything about how we educate and what we educate about.
Putting life at the center means we need to make space in education for wonder, curiosity, love, care, excitement, and enchantment with life. Children are born to learn! They are born curious about the world around them. We only need to create spaces of learning that foster, nurture, and encourage this wonder and enchantment with the world, rather than diminish it. Furthermore, we also need to shift the relationships within educational systems away from domination, control, and conformity towards collaboration, accountability, and reciprocity.
As such, education for adaptation needs to be world-centered (rather than student-centered, teacher-centered, or curriculum-centered). This means educating students to understand themselves as part of the community of life, and to find their gifts to be of service to the community, and for learning to be relevant to life. It needs to be earth-centered - honoring planetary limits and the wisdom of earth intelligence of which we are a part, and seeing ourselves as part of the earth’s metabolism. As we disrupt the individualism baked into modern education, collaboration becomes an essential methodology to restore relationality to the learning process.
World-centered also means fostering relationships grounded in responsibility and accountability - to each other, our communities, and to the earth community. It should be locally-rooted and locally-relevant, while keeping the local situated within the wider global planetary context. Some education for sustainable development still perpetuates the idea of humans as separate from nature, so a world-centered education must help us remember we are a part of the world, not separate from it or above it. When we center the world in our learning, learning becomes inherently wilder. Learning is wilder than schools can contain, and part of our task in world-centered learning is returning our learning to our communities and the wider world we are a part of.
Education for adaptation needs to be holistic, teaching for the whole human. It needs to honor that we are not just intellectual beings, but we are living, breathing, feeling, earthlings. Education needs be transrational, meaning it should honor and value ways of knowing beyond only the intellectual and rational, such as social-emotional, embodied, and land-based ways of knowing. It needs to be relational, not just informational. Again, to be clear, this is not to dismiss the intellectual and the rational - this is absolutely needed and has an important role to play in education and shaping the world. But it is to place this way of knowing as one among many, and re-valuing other ways of knowing that have been dismissed.
We also need to rethink what we mean by rigor. In education we are often focused on intellectual rigor, but often at a cost to well-being. Can we be intellectually rigorous, and also rigous in our relationships, and rigorous in our care? We need to rethink rigor in academic settings and how it can coincide with relational rigor and collective well-being.
In the face of uncertain futures, our imaginations and creativity are some of our greatest resources and assets. Traditional formal schooling tends to squash creativity over time while teaching students to conform to tests and exams. Education for fluctuating futures needs to nurture our creativity and imagination more than ever, as well as our ability to stay with the trouble of these times, dwell in uncertainty, and lean into emergence.
Education for adaptation needs to be transdisciplinary. The spirit of WEP is very much along these lines - that we need to get out of our disciplinary siloes if we are going to solve these problems, and I applaud KAUST for having the vision of the need for this kind of transdisciplinary exchange. This is what we need more of! Transdisciplinary also means we need scientists who are artists and artists who think like scientists, and I love to see this spirit reflected in WEP, too.
It should also be intergenerational. Modern education places people into age-based siloes, whereas throughout human history, humans have learned more intergenerationally. Education for adaptation should break free from age-based siloes and foster intergenerational learning spaces for life-long learning.
Furthermore, in our vastly interconnected world, we need to educate for intercultural understanding, which means educating for openness, awareness, and cultural humility. Additionally, we need a heavy dose of conflict transformation skills to navigate conflict as an inevitable and potentially generative part of life on a diverse, interconnected planet.
Finally, education for adaptation needs to be simultaneously critical and hopeful, rooted in agency. At the intersection of critique and hope lies our power to act -not just upon the world, but with the world. This is what Joanna Macy has called “active hope” - that we generate hope through the actions we take to make the world better. Education needs to equip students to be critical of the way things are, and feel empowered to act with the world to transform the world, towards making a better future with their everyday actions.
Regarding agency, it is important to know that we are not acting alone - we are acting with the living, breathing world that is also acting, that we are a part of. Systems of life tend to perpetuate life. We need to realign ourselves as a species to be good planetary citizens, playing our part in the regenerative whole, in the earth’s metabolism. A key to doing this is remembering ourselves as part of this living system, and disrupting the anthropocentrism we have learned through modernity.
When we think we are acting alone, this can be daunting to the point of immmobilization. No single person can solve our current crises alone. We need everyone bringing all of their gifts - and trust me, all of our gifts are needed, and none of our gifts alone are sufficient. We need all of us, working with as much love and care as we can.
Our agency is also about what we do with our knowledge. How we apply knowledge is never neutral, and it can be applied for benefit or detriment - it can be applied for health and well-being, or it can be applied for harm and violence. For example, science, engineering, and technology can serve to build war systems - which globally, so much human and material resources are spent developing new weapons of destruction, rather than systems that can serve and enhance and affirm life. We need scientists engineers and technologists who are eager to use their knowledge, creativity, and expertise to help us design and build futures in which all of life can thrive. I believe in you, and I believe in us!
As a side note, but important side note,re-imagining education for adaptation also means we must concurrently re-imagine our economic structures and relations.
Manish Jain, founder of numerous innovative education projects including the Ecoversities Alliance, has coined the terms “alivelihoods” and “deadlihoods” which I find to be helpful in thinking about re-imagining education and economies simultaneously. Livelihood is how we make a living - how we get our basic needs met and hopefully contribute to our communiities. Deadlihoods are the kinds of careers that contribute to death and destruction of people and the planet, and unfortunately many jobs in our current economic system would fall into this category. Alivelihoods are more than jobs - they are vocational pathways that allow us to contribute our unique skills, passions, and gifts towards collective and planetary thriving. An economy oriented towards alivelihoods is possible! And this is important for us to consider when we are re-imagining education, as we need to simultaneously re-imagine economic relationships and how we sustain our basic needs.
I want to close by returning to our love for the world and the futures we imagined. On the other side of love is grief: the grief for the harm humanity is causing each other and the planet. Vietnamese Zen Master and Peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh said that to address our ecological crises, what we most need to do is to hear the sound of the earth crying within us - when we understand our interbeing with all of life, we begin to understand that when we harm anyone or anything - human or nature - we are harming ourselves. When we can hear the sound of the earth crying within us, these cries will motivate us to act differently, and we will know what to do.
This is similar to what Joanna Macy calls “honoring our pain for the world.” When I first heard this phrase, I felt like it saved me. As a young person learning about the climate crisis (a long time ago!), I felt so much pain - pain for what humanity had done to the planet, and hopelessness of finding our way out of it. Joanna Macy teaches that honoring this pain - whether it is sadness or rage or grief or anger or anxiety, whatever form it comes in - and when we are able to honor it fully, from this place, we will have energy to know how to act and what to do. This is how we generate active hope.
Both of these teachers also said, and as we began this talk, we need to fall in love with the earth and remember what we love about being alive, what we are grateful for. When we can touch the wonders of the world - the beauty that is available in each moment, the miracle of our lives in each breath - this will motivate us to protect life. As we re-imagine education, it needs to have space for our grief for all that is being lost, and for our love for the world, and this grief and love will serve as great motivators. The great writer and educator bell hooks also said, “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the poliics of domination.” If we want to uproot systems of domination, rooted in a paradigm of separation, our educational systems help us learn to practice love - our love of learning, and our love of life.
Your question now might be, “OK, so how do we do this?” I’d need another hour for that, but for now, I just wanted to share three living examples of how these ideas are being implemented. One example is the university where I teach, the University for Peace, whose mission is to provide humanity with an institution of higher education dedicated to peace. Another example is Springhouse Community School in Virginia, USA, which places life at the center of learning and calls what they do “vitality centered education.” And finally, one of the examples I am most inspired by - because it is not one example, it is a global ecosystem of examples springing up all over the world - is the Ecoversities Alliance, which is an alliance of people who are reimagining higher education with the flourishing of life at the center. While I am just getting to know KAUST, I can see that you are a living lab for adaptation, and I look forward to continuing to learn more so that I can add KAUST to my list of examples in the future!
The term earthling is often used in science fiction to differentiate inhabitants of earth from alien species. I propose that we need to start thinking of ourselves as earthlings - as citizens of the earth, our shared planetary home. Biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, shares that “all flourishing is mutual.” Our efforts to reimagine education need to be rooted in the possibility of mutual flourishing for all of life, and to remember ourselves as earthlings, as citizens of our cherished planet.
As we close, I invite you to return to that place of love for the world, what you are most grateful for in being alive, and to that future you envision. May this love and our deepest desires for a future where all of life thrives begin to take root in the present moment, and serve to guide our actions, and may it help guide us in re-imagining educational spaces that contribute to the flourishing of all of life. Thank you for welcoming me to your beautiful corner of our shared planetary home. I look forward to continuing to engage in these ideas with you.
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Stunning piece. The tension between adaptation and accepting current systems is underappreciated. I've seen firsthand how conventional metrics like standardized testing train conformity over imagination, and thisseperation from lived experience drains curiosity faster than anything else. Reimagining rigor as relational practice really gets at something essential, it's not about lowering standards but expanding what we measure as 'succes' in the first place.
This is very interesting - but a daunting undertaking!!