“There's a fork in the road, and education has to make a choice. Young people are fervently waiting for us educators to catch up with them, to empower them and to help them make the future. By offering a holistic way of seeing and being, a regenerative, ecological, life-affirming paradigm can help shape new and energising pathways for a more hopeful, and secure future”

– Stephen Sterling

Programme Overview

• Type: e-Learning
• Start Date:  14 October 2024
  
• Registrations: until 21 October 2024
• Study Time: 3 to 5 hours / week
• Facilitation: by Jonathan Dawson and Guest presenters
  
• Length: 9 Weeks

The world of education is undergoing a profound transformation. To date, it has both reflected the core assumptions and values ​​of the dominant neoliberal worldview and played a central role in perpetuating them. A narrowly instrumental view of education, modeled to serve the perceived demands of a globalizing economy and culture, has come to define and to shape learning.

However, as in so many other domains, the foundations of the dominant paradigm are creaking. We are, in the words of Zachary Stein, living in a ‘world between worlds’, where the previously dominant structures and stories are dying and new ones are in the process of being born. We have the privilege of being dwellers in this liminal space in which we are called upon to be co-creators of whole new ways of social organization – not least in the field of education.

The challenge that lies ahead is to envisage educational forms fit for the needs of the 21st century and to chart pathways towards the realization of these visions.

There is already substantial momentum towards these ends. Studies in the fields of neuroscience and social psychology increasingly contradict conventional thinking about the separation of mind, body and emotions and underscore the importance of an education that seeks to develop head, heart and hands. Meanwhile, myriad experiments at all levels of formal and nonformal education are freeing up thinking about what holistic, place-based education might look like in practice. This includes a questioning of the legitimacy of limiting education to specific institutions – schools and universities – formally designated for the purposes of learning. 

Dive into this opportunity

Each session will include a suggested reading and/or video to watch together with guiding prompts or questions. The learning will happen through forum participation, reflection, and ongoing reflections led by Jonathan. 

At the end of the course, each participant will have written and shared a reflection paper on applications of the course material in their own personal and professional lives, together with next steps in their realisation.

Check out below some of the questions that will be addressed during the journey:

• How can I be most effective as an educator?
• Where is the professional niche where my gifts, passion and experience most meet the needs of the earth at this moment?
• What further professional training could I consider embarking upon to enhance my preparedness for my work in the world as an educator?
• What networks and learning communities could I turn to as sources of support to me in my work?

Register Here

Week 1 - Setting the scene in the company of Jonathan Dawson

• Introduction - How can education become part of the solution rather
  a key driver of the problem?

Week 2 - Education for food sovereignty and community development in Africa

• Mugove Nyika explores how people- and community-centred education
  in Africa is bridging gulf between the schoolroom and the community.

Week 3 - Education for Head, Heart and Hands

• Satish Kumar shares with us stories from his lifelong activism in
  the cause of environmental sustainability and social justice and the role that
  education has played in his journey, especially the creation of Schumacher College.

Week 4 - Getting new paradigm sustainable economy curricula into the mainstream

• Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelman explores with us her work in introducing more heterodox approaches to the study of economics in secondary school settings.

Week 5 - Deschooling society

• Manish Jain will explore how we can regenerate our diverse local knowledge
  systems, cultural imaginations and inter-cultural dialogue.

Week 6 - Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse with Compassion and Accountability

• Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti draws insights from University of the Forest digital campus initiative (universityoftheforest.org) and explores with us how the ontology of modern education has socialized us into a form of narrow-boundary intelligence marked by the artificial separation between humans and the rest of nature. This narrow-boundary intelligence creates a crisis of collective sense making that is the root of our current meta-crisis characterized by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), which is placing humanity at risk of premature extinction. The talk will also explore the need for a collective cultural move towards wide-boundary intelligence and, ultimately, relational wisdom, if we are to address the meta-crisis together

Week 7 - Facilitating educative communities as nodes of transformation

• Piedad Viteri shares her extensive experience of using ecovillage design and permaculture tools in schools to transform education into one that serves the purpose of nature and human regeneration

Week 8 - Empowering teachers to create a more compassionate, caring world –
                 inside and outside of the clasroom

• Rachel Musson, shares with us the Triple WellBeing approach, that draws on animal
  archetypes, to empower and support teachers.

Week 9 - Pulling together the threads

• Jonathan Dawson will guide a process of synthesis and consolidation, helping us to
  identify next steps and explore how we can provide mutual support ongoingly within
  the learning community.

• The Transformative Education runs for 9 weeks (including an orientation period).
  
• We suggest you dedicate 3-5 hours a week to receive maximum benefit from this programme.
• You can choose to pay in full or in instalments.
• We provide a limited number of scholarships, please apply here. Applications will be accepted until September 14, 2024 and results will be communicated to applicants by October 21, 2024.
• For further information, please email: yan@gaiaeducation.org

Graduates of our programmes have gone on to contribute to sustainability projects, build communities, become social entrepreneurs, partake in permaculture projects and bio-dynamic farming, support transition movements and much more.