An emergent story of regenerative learning infrastructure

This is a story of the learning soil that forms part of the hopeful and potential filled foundation to Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice.

Photos of the physical model of our assemblage of learning infrastructure patterns connected using fallen twigs and twine (model created by CoLab Dudley team member Jo — inspired by Helen’s introduction to the concept of assemblage)

Learning has become synonymous with formal education, which is often entangled in flawed systems that perpetuate injustice. This has resulted in a distorted perception of the true power of learning. As we understand it, learning is inherently a liberating practice that often thrives beyond the confines of educational systems (Mohini Govender, 2024)

Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice supports deeper nature connection and peer learning for climate action by local climate changemakers. Naming the patterns within this emergent learning infrastructure that sits well ‘beyond the confines of educational systems’ feels timely at this moment of School unfurling. The learning soil is critical as we work collectively and collaboratively to create conditions for the school to thrive and with it tentative pathways to flourishing futures. The learning patterns below, and infrastructure design questions they signpost us to increasingly resemble an approach that is regenerative in practice.

This is a story of emergence — the soil will remain dynamic and evolving as we come into relationship with new learning kin, new ways of knowing, and engage in new learning journeys.

Honouring Labour

This soil is made up of the lessons of the CoLab Dudley team learning over seven years rooted as it is in inviting curiosity and learning through doing. It is made up of the learning practices of Time Rebels and our creative partners who have woven embodied, experiential and multi-medium creative arts learning into the soil. That learning has been rooted in imagination, field work, and a relational practice grounded in care for people and the more-than-human. The soil is made up of the hundreds of What If questions asked by local people as they were invited by Time Rebels to experiment with new relationships to place learned physically (through play, through craft, through making models, through dance, through collage, through walking and foraging, through natural ink or medicine making), and learned via imaginaries (through storytelling, field recordings, music making, archiving, poetry, visual arts and more). It is also nourished by the learning of fellow travellers in our ecosystem, who like us, believe in open sharing of demonstrator experiences, tools, tips and lessons. We add to the collective resource of the knowledge commons through sharing our process and working out loud with all the vulnerability that requires. We are grateful for the openness of this learning culture and all that makes more possible.

Why surface learning patterns?

Firstly, what do we mean by patterns? Here I want to borrow this handy definition shared by Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation:

“In simple terms, patterns are interconnected behaviours, relationships and structures that together make up a picture of what ‘common practice’ looks like and how it is ultimately experienced by people interacting with and in a system.” (Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation)

As we reflect upon our culture of learning, by paying attention to these interconnections, we see patterns surfacing and swirling that can usefully be named, shared, designed in /out and evolved. Articulating these patterns and sharing them out loud, bringing them into conversation with partners, helps us to be curious about What If questions in relation to the agency of learning practices and infrastructure. Specifically,

💡 What if this learning soil is a catalyst for climate action?

💡 What if these learning patterns in practice reveal and embolden new narrative arcs, ways of being, relating and sensing in the world that support regenerative resilience?

Design from patterns to details is a permaculture design principle used throughout the People’s School planning. It is a way of zooming out to look for patterns in the bigger picture — in this case learning infrastructure to support climate action — and then using those patterns to form a really handy type of scaffolding from which it becomes much easier to design the detail of activity. With this in mind we have woven these initial patterns into our shared People’s School learning plans to help inform their evolution.

Initial analysis of the interconnected patterns within our learning infrastructure by CoLab Dudley team member Jo

What patterns of learning do we want to name, share and bring future intention to in our convening, practice and learning infrastructure design?

* Multiplicity of learning
* Rhythms of learning
* Rituals of learning
* Flows of learning
* Learning as emergent strategy
* Relational learning
* Learning ethics
* Place based knowledge (Kith)
* Learning languages
* Learning as imagination practice
* Learning as prefiguration
* Learning as regenerative resilience
* Learning as accountability
* Learning as a partner in action
* Caring for learning

Multiplicity of learning — The network learning moments are multifaceted and pluralistic in nature and form. They embrace a multitude of methods, mediums, co-learner perspectives, and convening spaces or moments. Importantly, this pattern of learning multiplicity intentionally brings different ways of knowing and knowledge types into relationship. The School has emerged from a relational outlook that embraces a world view of kinship, entanglement and interconnection with other communities and with the rest of nature. It is this philosophical lens that invites and nurtures practices of noticing and observing differently. It thrives through the interaction of a diversity of ways of knowing, sharing learning, reflection and sense-making. There is often an interplay of embodied, experiential, kinaesthetic and reflective learning.

Left hand image: We Can Make learning harvest zine. Right hand image: Getting into Hot Water collective enquiries documentation

Rhythms of learning — The most explicit rhythm nurtured so far is a seasonal rhythm we have found to be really generative. In practice this means learning tied to design and unfurling in Spring, learning as an agent of energy and action in the doing of Summer, learning as a shared yield in the feasting and celebration in the Autumn harvest time, and then learning as a gift that forms part of the rooting in the period of rest over Winter. These gentle rhythms help us navigate uncertainty of context and create conditions for adaptation and emergence. As we consider long-term stewardship we are asking what rhythms look like over longer time scales like 100 years?

Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice partner shared learning rhythms

Rituals of learning — Supporting these rhythms are rituals of learning particularly around shared reflection, collective enquiry, creative documentation and celebration. We know from the lessons of the last seven years as a learning-doing type of social lab that ritualising learning is critical for unlocking personal and collective potential. This pattern invites us to ask the question what other rituals might we explore through the People’s School that will support learning practices to unlock more possibilities of climate justice action? For example, as part of our new partner shared learning sessions Deb has introduced an honouring the land ritual where we each bring an item from the natural world to share at the beginning of our time together — this ritual helps bring our more-than-human kin into the room and part of the learning.

Flows of learning — there is an active convening for flows of learning across the network supporting interconnection, deepening of relationship, cross-pollination of ideas, skills exchange, and co-creation through the interaction of different knowledges and ways of knowing. An active practice of weaving relations by the CoLab Dudley team and creative partners sees a multiplicity of knowledges converge and entangle.

A snapshot of CoLab Dudley ecosystem rhythms and flows of activity and learning (beautiful visual by CoLab Dudley team member Holly)

The convening brings intention to learning flows across zones of possibility starting from our internal learning, and then rippling out to individual project learning, wider network learning, cross organisational learning, neighbourhood learning and beyond. This awareness of flows across zones extends to temporal zones and supports a practice of long-term thinking and focus upon intergenerational justice explicitly drawing upon Roman Kraznaric’s term ‘Time Rebels’. We use tools like the Three Horizons Framework to support futures consciousness in the present. While Time Rebel projects like Stories of Place and its living archive encourage visible flows of learning between the past and our inherited knowledges, knowledge in the present that we gift to future generations, as well as knowledges yet to emerge. Using the Doughnut Economics four lenses tool more intentionally over the next three years we hope to see different flows of learning across local, global, social and environment lenses that will lift up the intersectional nature of climate justice.

Photo of Field Works creative documentation zine created by Helen and Bill from Workshop 24

Learning as emergent strategy — Our learning culture has always sought to respond with creativity and an open heart and mind to the possibilities and challenges that working within complexity demands. Just as in nature unexpected conditions create new relationships, connections and patterns. Our evaluation approach is developmental allowing the guiding principles to be applied to shifting contexts. In addition, we actively convene shared learning that encourages different knowledges and ways of learning together creating an unexpected alchemy of new insights and creative possibilities. The seasonal rhythms of Dudley Creates cultural collaborators network and People’s School learning holds space for active sensing, sense-making and adaptation in support of emergence.

Relational learning — Relational learning is shared or social learning with other kin (human and more-than-human). It is central to the ‘learning together by doing together’ approach that features across all different elements of our work. It was key to the Dudley Doughnut Peer Learning journeys; it is integral to the shared learning rhythms of Stories of Place led by lab team member Holly Doron; and now it is key to the local Climate Changemakers who will be co-authoring the Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice curriculum through their peer learning and action groups.

Relational practice was core to the collaborative creative experiments and enquiries of 30 Time Rebels projects over three years of Time Rebel missions. These have actively paid attention to deeper relationships between local people, place, and our more-than-human kin through their focus upon relational learning, experimenting and co-creating in place. We will see this focus upon relationality continue to grow with an embodied lens in two of People’s School projects Getting into Hot Water led led by Bill and Helen of WorkShop 24, and Reclaiming our Roots led Deb, Clare and Erika of Ekho CollectiveCIC.

Creative documentation zine page illustrating learning within Reclaiming our Roots (led by Ekho Collective).

Helen has helped us to explore our partnerships within the People’s School through the new materialist concept of assemblage. This helps us see the agency of the non-human within our learning and action together as well as viewing different elements of our School ecosystem as a dynamic relational mesh/ assemblage of connections and shifting interactions. I was inspired by Helen’s use of assemblage to place the learning patterns in this lab note in twig and twine assemblage model to help us explore the interactions and relations between them.

Twig and twine assemblage of learning patterns by CoLab Dudley team member Jo

In addition, given its ecological design, relational practice is prioritised in the vital signs and practices used by the Dudley’s 100 Year Cultural Strategy in Action. The vital signs (surfaced through collective learning of Dudley Creates projects) are a learning tool to help the ecosystem stewards to pay attention to the health of the local cultural ecosystem in terms of connectivity, creative collaboration, and cultural democracy. Tracking these vital signs helps with the intentional focus upon increasing conditions for collaborations and co-creation between different artists, between artists and non-arts collaborators, between different creative communities and the rest of nature.

Regenerative design navigation guide from: Dudley Creates — 100 Year Cultural Strategy in Action. Designed by CoLab Dudley team members Jo and Holly

Shared learning and sense-making together is intentionally woven into all our convening as part of our lab goal to ‘build social learning and discovery capabilities across our network to support systems change’. This is learning and sensing as a way of being AND coming into new relationship with each other and place through reflective sessions that help build connection, weave bonds and inspire future collaborative action. This relational learning requires conditions for those relationships of trust to build over time. We see this collective and relational quality to the learning as central to regenerative futures in Dudley.

“The first step is to be aware of what we are activating in the world by the power of our attention and the story we propagate through our thoughts, words and actions. When we reach out to our communities (families, neighbourhoods, colleagues and friends) and invite them to live the questions together, we are inviting multiple perspectives and diverse ways of knowing to inform our cooperation in the co-creation of regenerative cultures. This kind of open exchange and inquiry can facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence and future consciousness to inform wise actions in the face of increasing complexity and in humble recognition of the limits of our own knowing. You too can become a conscious activist, change agent and bridge builder by starting such an inquiry in your community.” (Daniel Christian Wahl, 2017)

Learning ethics — Honouring labour has been an important practice in the learning ecosystem over the last seven years. We seek to understand, make visible and show gratitude to the existing learning threads we are all building upon; the labour of those learning now through live experiments and demonstrations; and the sharing of learning gained though lived experience. Underlying a regenerative approach to learning and the care ethic that frames it is our ongoing efforts to create a meaningful consent process that is generative and invites co-authorship. We aspire to an ethic that deepens the trust, creativity and reciprocity of the learning process, while also being honest about bias and positionality.

Since 2016 we have committed to and tried to find ways to practice an ethics process that is explicitly non-extractive and non-proprietary with open and active sharing in the Creative Commons for others to build upon. We are revisiting these ideas of consent, commoning, co-authorship, and bias recognition with creative partners and learners with a focus upon how to keep this ethic relevant and responsive throughout the School learning journey. It generates active questions for us in our learning design and practice as we come into new relationships and new contexts. We will keep sharing our process and lessons on this over the next few years as we ask each other:

🌱 “What IF? ethics processes were disruptive of power hierarchies? were caring and healing? inspired curiosity and questioning? connected us more deeply to our more-than-human kin? helped us develop generative relationships? were a spark for creativity?

Place based knowledge (Kith) — Place based knowledges as cultural inheritance and pathways to alternative futures has rippled throughout the learning since the lab began and has become more prominent since Dudley Time Rebel missions began in 2020. Through practices such as citizen storycatching, people’s archiving, street detectorism and collective counter mapping, place based knowledge and narratives become visible, valued and better cared for, openly shared, and critically animated. With this place based knowledge seems to come increased capacity for wayfinding and new ways to relate to that place, to nurture a sense of belonging and responsibility for its future. Experiments rooted in place based sensing and sense-making of past, present and future narratives invite new pathways to stewardship.

Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place — the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and crow and fox and stone are known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kithship, then, is intimacy with the landscape in which one dwells and is entangled, a knowing of its waymarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings. (Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt, 2021)

Revealing place based knowledge has lifted up the importance of care for knowledges otherwise erased by traditional memory or knowledge institutions, and a reawakening of knowledge threads between different generations. This has important ripples in terms of care for ancestral wisdom, as well as a criticality needed to question power, and why some knowledges are privileged and others risk erasure.

Today we see a reawakening in Western cultures of ancestral worldviews that see humans as part of nature. Of course this worldview didn’t ever disappear from many Indigenous and First Nation peoples’ ways of learning. These learning pathways and knowledges need to be cared for and understood as an essential gift from our past that encourage reciprocal relationships with place. We have seen from our shared learning that Time Rebel creative and relational practices actively invite local communities to cultivate new relationships with place (human and more-than-human), and with that the possibility of deeper connection with more-than-human and sense of stewardship.

Nature connection in the Stories of Place Time Portal

Over the last year as the People’s School has come to life we have increasingly focussed upon nature connection and reconnection using the University of Derby’s Five Pathways as a critical element of place based learning and wisdom. As we weave these pathways through our People’s School design and practice we have begun a collaborative learning process of testing out iterations upon the concept of nature connection and associated frameworks/ metrics.

As a way of helping decenter the human bias and exceptionalism in our learning we want to explore creative learning framings, languages, and ways of noticing change that explore a more regenerative worldview of nature intraconnection rather than nature connection (a thank you to Helen for lifting up the different language we can use as we begin this School exploration). As we used these learning patterns to begin our collective enquiry as a school into reimagining the nature connection index (NCI) we noticed why the existing approach felt in tension with our learning culture: where NCI used a single method we value multiple methods; where NCI has necessarily standardisded questions our practice is centered upon dynamic conversation; where the framing of NCI suggests a linear scaling we see change through the lens of emergence of multiple/proximate possibilities; where the language of NCI positions us as currently separate from nature and needing to reconnect, we start from a position of humans as nature; NCI understandably has a single nature connection focus, while our learning points to the intersectional and interdependent quality of many different system elements. In this way these patterns are already helping us continue to bring criticality to our School learning and evalaution. They help us ask:

“Does the nature connection framing reinforce a wider crisis of perception? Should we be exploring this relationship as part of nature? (i.e. social connection and nature connection are false category separations). What does that change?”

Regenerative design academic and practitioner Pamela Mang explains why this might be a valuable line of enquiry for us. She talks about the required shift from a ‘place-blind culture’ to regenerative cultures that enable what David Orr describes as ‘good inhabitance’:

“Humans, like all other species, are place-based creatures — shaping and shaped by the places we inhabit. Our diverse cultures are the products of our interactions with particular places. Cultures that sustain their vitality and viability have developed practices appropriate to their place, and rituals, moral systems, songs and stories that sustain those practices. Since the advent of the Industrial Age and its universal, place-blind culture, we are increasingly losing the ability to develop and maintain appropriate relations with place. We have, “fallen out of place” and are losing or have lost the once inherent capacity to understand and then establish right relationships, to put ourselves “back in place.” We are becoming what David Orr describes as residents rather than inhabitants. Where residency requires only cash and a map, an inhabitant “dwells . . . in an intimate, organic, and mutually nurturing relationship with a place. Good inhabitance is an art requiring detailed knowledge of a place, the capacity for observation, and a sense of care and rootedness.” Learning how to restore the value and the capability for inhabitancy is the creative challenge and opportunity … “ (Pamela Mang, 2005)

Learning languages — Over the course of 2022–23 we witnessed an embracing of multi- media creative documentation by Time Rebels as they used different ways to document their learning that often intentionally did not privilege the written word. As we try out these new ways of knowledge sharing emerging through the sounds, materials, markings, words, symbols, notes, and movements new ways of knowing come into relationship. Alongside these many languages we have prioritised the use of nature based metaphor (written and material) helping nudge us incrementally into closer alignment with our more-than human kin. Building our glossary helps us name the feelings and possibilities these languages unlock. We know that modern English often fails to convey the complexity or subtlety of connection or relationship with other kin (for example, see the new language stripes). The People’s School is a welcome chance to explore the storytelling power of other languages and vocabulary that help strengthen our cultural understanding of reciprocity and interconnectedness with our planetary home.

Language and the stories we tell shape our worldviews. So when the dominant worldview is wreaking havoc across and upon the Earth, is it not time for us to reconsider the language we use and the stories we live by? (Resurgence Magazine, 2024)

Learning as imagination practice — Regenerative futures require our collective imaginations. Learning and imagining are symbiotic processes in this work. The convening and design of the learning is always a creative process centred upon experimenting, discovery, practices of reflection, and social imagination. We regularly frame this imagination practice around What If questions that socialise and help bring future imaginaries into more tangible knowable being. As imagination practice the learning occurs through active processes of sensing and sense-making that in turn co-author new narratives about the future and what is more possible now. [We have borrowed and taken inspiration from: Rob Hopkin’s What If book to invite agency; Rob Shorter’s Imagination Sundial to bring attention to the conditions for imagination; and the Three Horizons framework originally developed by Bill Sharpe to help us recognise the Seeds of the Future in the present].

Reclaim our Roots zine page documenting New Futures that emerged from this project (Zine illustration by Deb from Ekho Collective)

Time Rebel Futures Cone canvas to support long-term thinking and futures consciousness (Canvas designed by CoLab Dudley team member Holly)

Learning as prefiguration — proximate to learning as imagination practice is the role it is beginning to play in an intentional practice of prefiguration. Regenerative designer Bill Sharpe describes examples of projects and deliberate action aligned with alternative futures in the present as “pockets of the future in the present” (2020). These examples of the future intentionally stand apart from dominant business as usual patterns of activity, and instead offer a glimpse of alternative patterns and alternative futures. We call these pockets ‘seeds of the future in the present’. We believe these ‘seeds’ help germinate futures ideas, practices, behaviours; as well as existing in connected ways to different parts of the cultural ecosystem not as isolated pockets. These seeds of the future are also living and as such are an act of prefiguration.

Prefiguration definition by Art/Work Practice

The Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice is one such example of a seed of the future in the present. It was a year in germination where partners lived it as a project prior to any funding outcome. Living the future school in the present was a bold practice of prefiguration that involved/ involves manifesting different ways of learning in the present that belong to future learning infrastructures that actively support community regenerative resilience. It has involved beginning a process of co-authoring of the curriculum with local people and testing out novel forms of distributed governance as partners. In an explicit act of prefiguration the early Partner learning has been framed as the beginning of the creative ‘enactment’ of an imagined Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (Dudley) 2024*. In this way People’s School learning processes are the enactment of a future Act of legislation as though it already exists today. The shared learning plan designs, the activities of the school actively sensing, observing and noticing differently, and then sharing that learning over the next three years will all animate a creative process of “drafting” that makes this ‘enActment’ a reality. [* Taking our inspiration from this progressive legislation in Wales.]

Prefiguration practice — photo from our first session on ‘enactment’ of the “Wellbeing for Future Generations Act (Dudley) 2024+”

Learning as regenerative resilience — Within both our focus upon cultural democracy in the 100 year cultural strategy in action and upon climate justice action by local people through Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice we draw upon Amartya Sen’s framing of development through the Capability Approach. The capability approach understands our individual opportunities within the freedoms of our particular context including the relationships and possibilities we are differentially afforded because of context. The Capability Approach translates within the People’s School learning as being collaborative, shared learning through doing together that prioritises individual and collective sense of agency to affect futures. It draws upon the active weaving of flows of learning pattern as well as the relational learning pattern to help build meaningful connections and deeper community collaboration. While working with fellow traveller Onion Collective we have begun testing out their community mapping tool Understory in order to use our learning practice to intentionally invite connections and working across difference that helps build common ground and unlock different perspectives around a shared focus. We have begun to consider the role of these different aspects of shared or peer learning within a new iteration of resilience that is transformational, proactive and futures focussed: it is called regenerative resilience.

“This emerging model of resilience focuses on adaptation, repair, and renewal. Drawing from systems and ecological theory, resilience becomes about how a system behaves under pressure, and how risk is distributed. In this model, resilience is tied to equalities because without systemic resilience, risks are shouldered by the most vulnerable. At the national level resilience is about building better social systems, rather than patching-up existing fragile systems, and communities’ self-determination, autonomy, and intelligence are important not just for specific groups or localities, but society as a whole.” (Common Vision Futures Playbook: Towards Regenerative Resilience, 2021).

This isn’t about bouncing back post disaster to the (unjust) status quo; this is about community resilience that is a precursor to transformation and more flourishing and just futures. This is a resilience that requires strong community relationships rooted in reciprocity that enable self-organising and sensing feedback loops supported by collective reflection and imagination. The People’s School focus upon climate justice means reflecting upon the risk distribution element of regenerative resilience is central to its purpose. And so as part of our testing out new governance practices we are developing a creative learning enquiry into the People’s School risk register. This learning is in early seed form and as it grows we will share what emerges.

Learning as accountability through our evaluation practice — There is always a concern with measurement and evaluation that we reinforce the inequalities of the status quo by measuring and valuing outputs and outcomes that are generic (not place/ context specific), short term impact (not long term possibilities), easy to place numbers against (the obvious surface stuff not deeper change), and prioritise the what (an activity/ action) with little consideration of the how (the process and practice). This is in part because the history of measurement is largely to do with control, who has power, and an unquestioning commitment to objectivity and separateness from the subject of measurement (Kaiser, 2024). This historical approach is often in tension with regenerative thinking, emergence, relational practice, or evaluation as a tool for social justice and so much broader accountability.

We have always tried to rethink, reimagine and diversify learning and evaluation to tip this short-termism and focus upon predefined Key Performance Indicators on its head. For us learning is a way of being curious in the world, asking questions of the way things are, and paying attention and noticing differently in order to support flourishing futures for us all. This is central to our sense of accountability to a much wider community including peer learners, a wider ecosystem of cultural collaborators, the wider Dudley community including our more-than-human kin, to the generations to come who will inherit the learning, fellow travellers, as well as institutions that support this work (e.g. Dudley CVS who hosts the lab and funders who have invested in this work).

For CoLab Dudley shared learning is integral to our ongoing practice of Principles-Focussed Evaluation (PFE), and as such learning has become a critical part of lived everyday governance and accountability to our North Star principle to be good ancestors. PFE is a form of values-led developmental evaluation developed by Michael Quinn-Patton to better support working with complexity, emergence of possibility and potential, and responding to uncertainty of context. PFE supports our emergent strategy that requires ongoing sensing and sense-making from a wide diversity of sources to support project adaptation, and judgement around movement towards intended outcomes. We have 5 GUIDEing principles that have evolved through the learning within the work, and based upon foundational values and intentions for pathways to a just transition to regenerative futures. These principles help in both everyday and long term decision making, they inspire action and learning, they evolve as context requires, and are evaluable in terms of both adherence (i.e. how we do things) and expected and unexpected outcomes (what we call ripples of change).

Illustration by CoLab Dudley team member Holly of the interconnected CoLab Dudley Principles developed and practiced as part of our Principles-Focused Evaluation.

An exciting emerging layer to this pattern of accountability in learning is being developed by team member Holly. Holly is doing a collaborative PhD with CoLab Dudley and Civic Square exploring how people might collectively learn, imagine, prototype changes in their habitat that are regenerative. They are experimenting with how co-creative processes from architecture, art and design can invite us to understand place, imagine multiple futures and bring regenerative futures closer to reality. As part of their research Holly is experimenting with emerging regenerative research principles that seek to support ways of doing research in a regenerative way. These offer another layer of care in terms of everyday accountability for learning practices that are generative not extractive.

Learning as a partner in action — We co-create sensing and sense-making design tools to support way-finding and help navigate experimentation in uncertainty. Together, we test them out, make changes based upon our shared learning, and then put those tools and processes out into the Creative Commons, actively sign posting them to others taking action for civic good to build upon and tailor to their context. These tools guide processes of deep reflection, shared analysis and creative documentation to aid future action (or as we call it data foraging, data harvesting, and data mulching).

Time Rebel data harvesting zine canvas designed by CoLab Dudley team members Kerry O’Coy and Jo Orchard-Webb.

Prototype Time Rebel Reflection Record to support data foraging making use of nature inspired language and metaphors to encourage connection with our more-than-human kin. Designed by CoLab Dudley team member Jo.

Perhaps ‘caring for learning’ is a canopy pattern? — a pattern that is a manifestation of smaller patterns acting in concert

We increasingly have clarity about the responsibility of regenerative learning infrastructures to care for knowledge and knowledge sharing pathways.

Caring for learning — We know from Time Rebel experiments that caring for place based knowledge has an essential role within work towards cultural democracy and intergenerational knowledge inheritance. For example, Dudley People’s Archive, Afro Histories Dudley, and Reclaiming our Roots all engaged in re-animating, re-connecting to and caring for untold, obscured or forgotten knowledges, narratives of place and cultural heritage. Through the creative caring for that knowledge local people were invited to take part in collective imagining of alternative futures of Dudley. We have learnt through Time Rebel use of democratising practices to support cultural capabilities in the communities they co-create with, and in their inspiring pubic archiving that actively disrupts hierarchies of cultural value, that caring for learning in this way increases our sense of agency to take cultural action.

Geoff Mulgan talks of an instinct for knowledge within societies to atrophy or be actively erased (Geoff Mulgan 2024). This creates an urgency in bringing intention to caring for knowledge in regenerative practice. We asked this question of ourselves last year when we were co-creating a lab database where we use a range of lens to look at data we collect from different perspectives. We call it the Learning Composter given its generative function! During this co-creation process we were curious about …

🌱 ‘What is the role of our learning infrastructure in caring for the knowledge revealed and co-created”? Then as part of this process of caring we wondered “How does it reanimate and share that knowledge in ways that honours the authors, extends the reach of that wisdom, and invites opportunities to build upon it through collective imagining and experimentation?”

We realise that part of the answer to caring for the learning requires us paying attention to the regenerative qualities of the learning infrastructure. So by taking inspiration from nature we try to intentionally design, practice and convene learning in service to: relationality, interdependency, emergence, diversity, potential of place, flows across boundaries, and reciprocity. Practically, this looks and feels like the learning patterns above in practice. For example:

1. rhythms of knowledge celebration — convening seasonal celebratory gatherings supports knowledge amplification and cross-pollination;
2. shared and peer learning convening — moments designed to grow collective knowledge by socialising learning through ripples of learning exchange and shared sense-making across the network. Growing peer learning capabilities intentionally invites freedom of questioning, critical thinking and reciprocal flows of knowledge or skills. All the while being premised upon mutual respect for different knowledges and ways of knowing.
3. regenerative ethics practice centred upon care for all kin — this seeks to build generative relations between kin founded upon establishing meaningful consent that honours labour, is honest about bias, and is explicitly not extractive or proprietary. Instead co-learners contribute to the knowledge commons. Commoning of any type is a practice of care for collective flourishing, it is a practice rooted in abundance rather than scarcity or proprietary worldviews. We believe a just transition requires this open sharing of learning for collective good.
4. hosting knowledge for future citizen use — by creating micro platforms like the Stories of Place archive or Dudley Creates Digital Allotment, that are public places to hold knowledge in a way that invites interaction, curiosity and addition for contemporary and future citizens.
5. multiplicity — our approach to learning, (we call it detectorism) explicitly encourages knowledge sharing in multiple forms and mediums meaning it translates and transmits across multiple ways of knowing. The way we learn is open, social and values led. It zooms in to the personal and immediate as well as zooming out to global interdependences, to future and past generations. This approach to learning is not a static or fixed methodology, but rather, dynamic and contextual honouring of new and old (place based) wisdom as they come into relationship.
6. learning by doing together — years of experimenting on Dudley High Street has taught us that knowledge is often best cared for and kept alive when it is part of doing and action. We have seen the animation of knowledge through experimentation in over 30 Time Rebel projects over 2020–23. The intentional framing of learning as experimentation invites a practical prototyping and socialised quality to the learning that will continue to be central to the community climate action of Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice.
7. relationship based upon knowledge of place (kith) — using all our senses to grow connection and understanding of our locality unlocks place based wisdom, and narratives that help forge new relationships to place within us. It cultivates new connections that form a type of embodied entanglement with that knowledge so that we carry it with us in our everyday ways of being and in the way we make sense of the world. Through the Time Rebel learning in More-Than- Human High Street, Field Works, Stories of Place, Growing Land Connections and Reclaiming our Roots there is an embodied practice of cultivating kith (thank you Lorna for signposting us to this perfect word).
8. care and connection through storytelling — as we move forward with the People’s School we are thinking more and more about our practice of storytelling and how the learning is honoured, woven into narrative and then travels throughout those stories in a multitude of forms. What does it mean to create new stories that are handed down from generation to generation as a way of caring for knowledge? We are grateful for the rich learning exchange with fellow travellers MAIA and take inspiration from their beautifully layered storytelling practice. We will bring extra attention to the languages pattern (explored above) as part of this storytelling.
9. nested learning — another of nature’s patterns we want to draw inspiration from is nestedness. We hope this line of enquiry will be particularly helpful in orientating the care for learning within Dudley Creates — Dudley’s 100 Year Cultural Strategy in Action which bridges time and geography with fractals of ‘learning through doing’ at a range of interconnected and nested layers.
10. research partnerships grounded in care — finally, as part of our relational practice we are learning what it means to hold boundaries around our ecosystem and lab learning to ensure the research collaborations we are part of are neither extractive or proprietary. Instead we seek out and nurture collaborations that are intentionally generative, co-evolutionary, honour labour, are non-hierarchical, act as a catalyst for imagination in action, and ultimately care for collective flourishing through knowledge co-creation. We began explicitly paying attention to the quality of collaborations following this joyful learning collaboration in 2020–21. Now together we are bringing intention to what it would mean to co-design a research collaboration between community ecosystems and academia that is grounded in trust, care and meaningfully regenerative in process, practice and principle.

From patterns to details

Over the coming years this assemblage of patterns in our learning infrastructure will be re-animated, adapted and added to. We will continue to reflect together, and openly share insights on the the role regenerative learning infrastructure plays in reaffirming natural world intraconnection and climate justice action.

A note of gratitude to all the Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice partners and Dudley Time Rebels generously and openly sharing their learning in the spirit of active hope for flourishing futures in Dudley. These patterns are their gift to the foundations of regenerative learning infrastructure in the School.

Openly shared resources we are grateful for, and are drawing upon as we think about creating conditions for regenerative learning infrastructure to flourish

Diversifying evidence and value — Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation
https://medium.com/good-shift/diversifying-evidence-and-value-b5ceb4ed8cc1

Common Vision Futures Playbook: Towards Regenerative Resilience
https://commonvision.uk/projects/towards-regenerative-resilience/

What is Liberatory Learning?
https://networkweaver.com/what-is-liberatory-learning/?mc_cid=202686fbf0&mc_eid=bcc6e8a977

Becoming Wayfinders — Building Capabilities in Limiting Times
https://medium.com/age-of-emergence/becoming-wayfinders-building-capabilities-in-liminal-times-part-1-f49c10af5078

The Art of Scaling Deep
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a0b2bbb80bd5e8ae706c73c/t/650e01c6fba1ac5ee2d1ae74/1695416781894/The+Art+of+Scaling+Deep+September+2023.pdf

Thinking Differently — Language can change our relationship with the environment
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5956-thinking-differently.html

Measurement as a Regenerative Practice
https://networkweaver.com/measurement-as-a-regenerative-practice/?mc_cid=d42d3c988e&mc_eid=bcc6e8a977