Education, learning, arts and culture — front and centre, joyfully creative
All our institutions need a fresh take. Education, Arts and culture are no exception.
Conventional academic education is out of sync with the real needs for ongoing lifelong learning and positive impact in our society. Learning can occur via a much wider spectrum for young people and across all generations.
Arts and culture are often seen as peripheral and discretionary. Yet arts and culture tap our individual and collective spirit and hold promising pulsating potential to reach, connect and inspire citizens anywhere and everywhere locally and globally around the world.
Arts and culture make us feel. They evoke. They bring things to life in visceral ways.
Music, film, dance, arts and crafts…any and all forms touch us deeply and inspire our own creative life force.
We draw from, (re)connect and celebrate our Indigenous roots, our wisdom traditions, and our rich and colourful heritage wherever we are rooted and relating in the world.
The work and contributions of creatives and educators are typically under-valued.
And yet they are integral to adaptive living human system transformation.
They have the power to connect, translate, amplify and activate.
They can help to model deeper layers of adaptable systemic social change, essential to regenerative capacity, over time.
Education and Arts and Culture cut across all domains of Unstitution’s work in and beyond initiatives and coalitions.
They are strategically woven fully throughout all living lab coalitions and initiatives and our Living Operating System activities.
The Art of the possible springs to life when we seed, nurture and embed creative learning experiences and opportunities within and across all domains.
Transforming education toward learning ecosystems in society encompasses:
⚛️ Learning, knowledge and transcontextual insights to navigate systemic change
⚛️ Integrating learning as an embodied, practical, experiential and accessible part of life
⚛️ Learning-in-action as a life-long evolutionary human (consciousness) development process
⚛️ Learning across the generations, cultures and at all life stages and cycles
⚛️ Community-based learning
⚛️ New curriculum for learning
⚛️ Re-skilling to equip people for work and roles needed in our changing society
⚛️ Reciprocal multigenerational mentorship
Arts and Culture towards social change as a catalytic multimodal, multi-sensorial activation strategy:
⚛️ Building awareness and inviting engagement in important social issues
⚛️ Generating novel, creative ideas and approaches for addressing complex systemic issues
⚛️ Evoking creative inspiration within communities
⚛️ Helping to integrate arts and culture into the mainstream fabric of society
⚛️ Bringing social change to life by tapping the human creative spirit and capacities
⚛️ Supporting local artists, venues and events that display, present, promote and share culturally creative social impact work and experiences
⚛️ Honouring, inviting and celebrating all manner of Indigenous wisdom
⚛️ Bringing art (and aesthetics/beauty) to people and place (access)
⚛️ Medium as message and creative expression
⚛️ Supporting multi-cultural diversity and values
Education and Learning and Arts and Culture are fundamental multimodal building blocks that can help shift toward integrated holistic ways of being, bringing more left and right brain balance to everything. They are integral to extending reach, inspiring, developing capabilities and mobilizing social change.
We welcome people whose creative work will help to embody and embed learning, art, culture, spirituality, inspiration and innovation — to participate.
Spirited emergent work and play are the life blood of movement making…inspiring new stories, joyful resilience, and a (reframed) sense of belonging, with people everywhere and anywhere moving in little and big ways. There are billions of stories that we collectively need to share and hear.
This is also about making space in our lives to birth new life-affirming stories.
Cultural creatives, progressive learning modalities and holistic approaches are increasingly moving beyond the fringes and margins. Bring it on! The regenerative (r)evolution is manifesting in many forms — a dance of emergence and strategy.
*This article was updated June 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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