A 4-day virtual conference to re-imagine education at a critical moment in history.
For the last 200 years, many have worked to improve the education system and it has not been enough.
What if we re-imagine higher education from the root?
In collaboration with the Ecoversities Alliance and partnering communities from around the world, the Re-imagining Education Conference is a space for transformative educators to connect, re-imagine, design, and embody new approaches to higher education from within and beyond academia.
Imagination
Explore what already was and what is yet to be; develop the wisdom, perspective, and tools to bring our more desired ways of being to life.
Unravelling
Acknowledge what is harmful, or not sustainable, and explore how to create spaces for letting go and safely transitioning into a more compassionate reality.
Emplacement
Sense what is around us, and develop the awareness and resilience to flourish within our local environments, in solidarity with the land.
2021 Speakers and Facilitators
2021 Collaborators
2021 Conference Harvest
One question that resurfaced throughout the conference was:
“What are the seeds of re-imagining education?”
After the conference we realized that so many seeds had been planted.
We wondered what to do with them and how to carry the creative energy generated by the event forward?
We decided to do some gardening!
Metaphors are an awesome way of explaining some processes that we invent to play together.
In the unlearning paths we take, we have come across metaphors of seeds, of the earth and now after a conference that led us to re-imagine education, the best thing was to get our hands in the metaphorical soil. The conference itself was fertile soil, we learned from many places on the earth, and many seeds were exchanged and planted during this time.
The seeds to re-imagine education were as diverse as those that give us the fruits of the earth.
We put out a call for gardeners and waited to see who would come to play!
For 6 weeks, 16 people came together to review, think, and plan what to do with so much content created out of the Conference.
We gathered from India, Canada, United States, Spain, Ecuador, and Romania. We met every Tuesday for a couple of hours, to explore what we could do with the garden to not only nurtures the intention, but also ourselves.
In the making, in starting a project, in walking together we can unravel ourselves. Being together is an invitation to mirror each other and it is a way to continue to find out more about our internal worlds.
How did we do it?
We shared poetry, songs, we organized the information of the germinated seeds, to see what we had in our garden. We made a shared toolkit, so everyone could have a view and use what was there.
Dynamics:
Tuesday sessions looked like:
A check-in, game, some conversations to get to know each other in a virtual space. Then we started to organize what was interesting for each of us, to share proposals, activities, what kind of projects we wanted to do, and start to give ideas around what was there in front of us.
While we kept taking steps, the tasks became more real and small. We saw that there was a lot to learn, that we could support each other in many different ways. We created groups to organize the tasks. One big group did interviews so they could get to know other people working on what was interesting for them.
Others got together to do some visuals for social networks, analyze some information from the participants.
Voices of Re-imagining Interviews
After the conference, we went through some of the 500 participants’ registration submissions and found some incredibly interesting responses and projects. This incredible playlist of interviews conducted by a small group of us was the result of reaching out to some folks whose projects of re-imagining we found compelling. We asked them about their work and approach to re-imagining education.
Common threads from the interviews:
- Willingness, to keep the “stuck” moment in life as a source of inspiration, new learning
- Being in nature as a way to communicate with the others
- The unlearning, outside the academics mindset – learning as a way of living
- The “bridging” from the re-imagining to “structure” education
- Listening to the fears…
- Transgenerational healing
- Re-imagining education as entrepreneurship- the human capacity to innovate
- Heroes Journey present. Not solving but finding more questions, and then in the middle THE question, allowing future and nature to emerge
- Leave/step outside the system to then bridge and bring change
- Re-imagining education is about oneself is the re-imagining of the self- “To re-imagining education starts with oneself”
- Attending to the calling
- Community place-based learning
- In learning, there is STILL something magical it happens in the relation- in the experience allow space and cater for that
- Knowing of the body
- Happiness in doing the work to re-imagine education
- Unbalanced feminine principle
- Learning with-in nature ( mountains, oceans, rivers, farms, trees as teachers)
Memes in the Garden
Poetry in the garden
I see Some birds flying high in the sky, conquering their dreams
Watching them I feel free, fearless, and not scared of achieving my dreams
I too want to fly with them as high as possible
– Pooja
a path that shows clarity
that feels inviting and challenging
like a call for this moment in my life
-Juan Jose
The light turned to growth, slow slow
An invitation
to breathe in today’s sunlight
-Eileen
Bodies in movement
trembling forward from the alchemy of soil
tranquility in the flow of death and life
– Sierra
Music in the garden
“Rupture” – by Melanie Eden
“Rupture” (Lyrics)
by Melanie Eden
A root,
a companion,
drying out.
The river below
Is love contemplated in beauty…
Wide, vast mysterious.
Leaving behind all of this.
We see our stories,
look into our myth.
Break free in a thousand different places.
The portal opens up.
If we can image it to.
At a child’s pace,
Help me to do this by myself.
Hold your head up
Hold your head up
Mmm…
Hold your head up
Hold your head up
Mmm…
To die
With boots on
In a cosmic hall
That we fall into
And I finally fit
And I’m ready to screw up
But I’ll be flapping my wings through the night
We act
from where
we stand.
We create as many resources as possible.
Are we to admit that we are lost
at the cost of knowing?
To be changed, always involves, some kind of loss.
Is it easier to cry than to imagine the end of the world as we know it?
In the service of life
to do more than just fix ourselves.
Oh the cloud hands are coming
into more than just physical.
And with all that arises
Will we learn to be with it all?
To be just as we are,
as the sun goes on living.
And there’s nothing to do accept recognise the courage to be breathing…
“Trail of Tears” – Words by Four Arrows, Produced by Alex Merron
“Who Knows How Many Other Stories” – Words by Shephali Patel, Produced by Alex Merron
Podcast Episodes
Highlighted Recordings
What seeds have grown for you since the last Re-imagining Education Conference?
Send us your fruits of re-imagining here to include them on this page!
Gardeners
Sierra
Eileen
Manish
Andreea
Pooja
Pia
Andrea
Anip
Daniel
Juan José
Mahi
