Bioregional learning guided by 4 D regenerative design literacy
My personal relationship with Gaia Education and its programmes go back to the year 2000 when I first learned about the curriculum under development by ecovillage educators from the global North and South working together upon visiting Findhorn in my trusty VW van.
I saw an early draft of the curriculum mandala in 2002 at the Restore the Earth conference at the Findhorn ecovillage, and it matched what I was exploring in my thesis for my Masters in Holistic Science at Schumacher College at the time.
A few years later in 2005 I was present at the official launch of the curriculum at the 10 year anniversary of the Global Ecovillage Network and as an official contribution to the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development.
One of the radically pioneering contributions of Gaia Education is to expand the so called ‘three legged stool’ approach to sustainability by a 4th dimension: worldview. It is only through becoming aware of our own worldview and the existence of other worldviews that we can begin to question our own thinking and start the so urgently needed process of ‘un-learning’ in order to re-learn how to be regenerative cultures again.
In 2006, I used my last post-doctoral funding to sign up for the first EDE Training of Trainers at Findhorn and then joined the GEESE (Global Ecovillage Educators for a Sustainable Earth) in 2007 at their meeting at Wangsanith Ashram in Thailand. I helped Pracha and Jane run the first EDE in Thailand.
Here is a paper I wrote about my work with Findhorn College, Gaia Education and various universities in 2008:
Since 2008, I have worked in many different roles for Gaia Education and have written little over half of their online curriculum for the GEDS programme, especially the Worldview and Economic Design dimensions. In 2015, I designed the concept and wrote the content of the SDG Community Implementation Flashcards and Training of Multipliers, and authored the manual and the SDG Project Implementation Canvas.
Here is an article I published in The Ecologist in 2016 topromote the excellent work of Gaia Education:
and another from 2018:
Since the change in leadership at Gaia Education, I have helped the new co-CEOs Sally and Pedro rebuild a much more horizontal organization that truly serves activists, pioneers of change, and community weavers all over the globe, with partners in more than 55 countries on 6 continents.
I am proud to have been part of building this amazing education provider which has transformed the life of so many by enabling them to form a more active part in the healing of their communities, local economies and the ecosystems they steward.
I just managed to raise some funds to continue the pioneering work that Taisa Mattos, Macaco Tamarice, Mericia Silva Eichmann and others are doing in developing both the ‘Gaia in Schools’ and the ‘Gaia Schools’ (see The Chestnut Tree and Gaia Kool) programme, which is gaining more and more interest from schools around the world. The Gaia Youth programme has created some amazing didactic materials to engage different age groups in collaboration with other partners within a EU funded project.
With the upcoming 4D regenerative design literacy programme I take the opportunity to share my passion for Gaia Education and their programmes and pedagogy. We will explore in 6 webinars
i) why regenerative design is always specific to the biocultural uniqueness of place,
ii) why taking a 2nd order perspective and paying attention to one’s own worldview is critical;
iii) why strengthening regional and local economies is now a resilience imperative;
iv) how to design as nature and re-align with life’s regenerative impulse at the appropriate scale;
v) why building the relational field is possibly the only thing we know for certain will help positive emergence; and
iv) how all of this relates to bioregional regeneration and the wealth of tools, examples, practices, frameworks, and inspirations hidden in Gaia Educations whole systems design curriculum.
Join me for a 6 webinar learning journey starting November 4th with an additional 6 sense making sessions among the global community of co-learners. The course starts on November 4th with late enrolment possible until November 11th.
In the second edition of this learning journey I will focus even more on how to apply the content of the Gaia Education online curriculum to a long term process of bioregional learning and mapping of the expressions of life’s regenerative impulse in your home bioregion.
In 2016, just after my book Designing Regenerative Cultures came out, I spend a number of months working on a new programme for Gaia Education which I had suggested at the last meeting of the GEESE in 2014. The working title: ‘Bioregional Design Education’ (BDE).
The basic idea behind this programme was to build on the tested strength of both the curriculum content (of the online course) and the powerful applied teaching/learning methodologies of the Ecovillage Design Education face-to-face programme.
Whereas both Gaia Education’s online and the residential courses around the world usually had very diverse groups of learners ranging in age from 16 to over 60 and usually with participants from diverse countries and continents, the aim of this programme was to combine online and face-to-face learning over a 10 month learning journey that would gather an entireley bioregional community of learners once a month in person and weekly online and in smaller study groups locally.
I went through the detailed topics and content of the EDE and the GEDS progamme and listed the core principles, the supporting strategies and the competencies, skills and experiences aquired in through the process of collective bioregional learning.
Worldview:
Social Design Dimension:
Economic Design Dimension:
Ecological Design Dimension:
My proposition based the experience I have with complex collaborations with multiple organisations and agendas involved and also based on learnings from such networks here in my chosen home bioregion of Mallorca, was that what matters most is to focus on weaving the ‘relational field’ that allows people in place to know, value and trust each other and be aware of the capacities and latent potential in that field which also includes a much deeper and more complex awareness of the bio-geo-physical and socio-cultural uniqueness of place.
Which is to say, local initiatives would do well to start by only learning together for a year and in the process get to know and trust each other and fall in love with the potential of their place again. Going into tedious meetings about vision and mission statements, shared values, governance systems to then quickly rush into the ‘must do’ (rather than be together) of ‘low hanging fruit projects’ that allows to demonstrate impact to possible funders, might be the more common, but fraught path. We need time to learn and unlearn together, and the relational field between people and place that collective learning and making the bioregion visible to itself create, is the basis of trust, share purpose and understanding, and wise action in the face of uncertainty.
What running a 10 month programme like the BDE would do in a place is to create that opportunity to learn and unlearn together and begin to map the many expressions of life’s regenerative impulse already present in a given bioregion and enlist them into a shared narrative of collective caring, loving, healing, regenerating community and place. The unfinished map created by the first cohort would be passed to next years co-hort to improve upon, up-date and expand, and so on, year by year. This would slowly create a social field of ‘graduates of the programme’ which would all have a shared understanding of each others awareness of their region and hence a huge potential for collaboration.
People could use the programmes design project to evolve their own project, business plan, or educational offering and potential collaborators and funders might meet each other through such a programme and the network it would deepen and widen year after year, 20–30 people at a time. After only 5 years the 100 to 150 graduates within a given bioregion would be a powerful inoculant of cultural transformation and bioregional regeneration. Local and regional partnerships that would include offering the local and regional government to participate by sending one of their own each year as a staff development and liaison person, or inviting regional businesses to send their staff or sponsor local bursaries for teachers who can take their learning into the schools.
This remains ‘work in progress’ as once the programme was planned out with the focus on optimising the experience of the learners and the impact on the local bioregion where the programme was held, I had to realise afterwards that there was no viable economic model to make the course accessible and have the teachers and facilitators paid a motivating and fair wage for the hard work and commitment that is needed to hold such a community of learners throughout 10 month.
In ideal scenario about 80% of the course fees should be covered through local/regional government scholarships, as well as, the support of businesses committed to strenghtening the bioregional economy and local production for local consumption, plus core-funding from philanthropic foundations who want to support bioregional regeneration around the world. If participants only have to pay 20% of the course cost, it will make the programme much more equitably accessible and the significant commitment of time for such a programme would not be paired with also having to make more income to afford the participation.
I am still hoping to find funders to develop this programme further and run a first pilot in my (chosen) home bioregion of Mallorca / Balearic Archipleago. So do get in touch if you know anyone who would like to support this development work that would then be scaled-out to bioregions around the world through Gaia Education’s long-term partners around the world who have the necessary knowledge of the bio-cultural uniqueness of their places and bioregions. I am also working on helping Gaia Education find a new core-funder after the remarkable Ross Jackson stepped back from taking that role during the first 18 years of the organisations development. Let me know if you want me to send you the ‘Case for Support’.
Gaia Education to date hs certified over 370 face-to-face and e-learning programmes, reaching 55 countries, 26,000 people and 147 nationalities, in every kind of setting imaginable. Their life-changing courses enjoy a 92% ‘excellent/good’ rating worldwide. In 2022, Gaia Education received the Luxembourg Peace Prize for Outstanding Peace Education.’
Example / Introduction from the four dimensions:
I leave you with a free pdf of the Ecological Key, one of the four books that outline each of the dimensions with diverse articles from practitioners around the world:
Don’t forget to join the up-coming learning journey if you want to have a chat about all this and how it could help you and your community and bioregion become a more active participant in the rise of the ReGeneration.
You can reach me through the contact form on my website.
