Ideal's in action

Although the inventory of activities/ processes that I tried to list above, while being far from comprehensive, clearly displays the multitude of tools this journey equipped me with and which may now take many shapes and times of application, it is nevertheless on some perhaps less tangible and harder for me to include in an inventory-style box learnings that I would like to expand on here.

The first and foremost learning that I have taken with me is the meeting with invaluable people whose presence and work make me feel richer in encounters. Although the degree of exchange and quality of bond may not be measurable, the knowledge of their existence enlarges in my mind the spectrum of what is possible. If I imagine myself as a fish in a lake of inspiration, this represents the addition of some cubic meters of precious water that makes my life fuller in nutriments to take and spaces to wander around. If we are all drops in an ocean, it makes parts of the ocean more familiar and accessible to the little drops we are. Within this metaphor, my upcoming participation in two seminars in Greece this summer with two of the other ‘fish’ who took part in this trip is proof of the added potentialities that this meeting of drops in a shared time-space can bring about. Together we may explore further parts of the ocean and…if we listen to Pepe (member of Palma Nana cooperative) “drop by drop you shape the rock”.

Another learning revolves around place-based education. Sometimes called pedagogy of place, it is a type of experiential education, of community-based education and of education for sustainability, which constitutes an educational philosophy. The term was coined in the early 1990s by Laurie Lane-Zucker of The Orion Society and Dr. John Elder of Middlebury College. They define¹⁾ it as

[…] the pedagogy of community, the reintegration of the individual into her homeground and the restoration of the essential links between a person and her place […] It often employs a process of re-storying, whereby students are asked to respond creatively to stories of their homeground so that, in time, they are able to position themselves, imaginatively and actually, within the continuum of nature and culture in that place. They become part of the community, rather than a passive observer of it.

It is my feeling that in the case of this Heterotopia Tour, we experienced a potent example of place-based education during our 12-day stay in Serra Guarneri. Franca, our facilitator, initiated the process of ‘re-storying’ upon our first walk in the woods when recounting ‘the ash tree cosmology’, a deep ecology tale. Coupled with the story of how the oak tree tricked the devil by saying he would be able to control the woods when all its leaves would be gone, something never possible since when leaves are about to die on this tree there are already more sprouting, I feel this initiated us into adopting a point of view that is rooted in this place and project. Aside from highlighting the extraordinary pattern of dynamic balance and agency of nature, it is a point of view which illustrates belonging and connection of humans with other living systems. Even further, in my understanding, this was an invitation towards a kind of ‘disposition’ that resonated in this place and to name it I have borrowed the concept of ‘biospheric householding’ from Andreas Weber (2013) ²⁾ .

To understand this fancy concept Weber points us to the nearly identical structure of the terms «eco-nomy» and «eco-logy». Both, he states, “build on the metaphor of housekeeping and the provisioning of existential goods and services (the Greek word «oikos» means «house», «householding» or «family»). Both concepts have a particular and related manner of treating the organisation of this existential supply” (Weber, p. 23, my emphasis). This double metaphor of eco-nomy/logy, if applied in a proper, non-reductionist way, provides a perspective for seeing all living household processes, ecological or human, from the same angle. This does not only imply an economy that does not exclude nonhuman beings and land but importantly also one that does not distinguish between material exchange processes and meaningful human relationships. It is an idea which brings forth the human tradition of interacting with material things on a social basis – and not just through impersonal, cash-mediated market relations –and which is the hallmark of a commons.

This is a reality which was felt and experienced throughout the numerous processes of our stay. It personally dawned on me with Franca’s invitation to us to inhabit that place as our home, and in this way to live in its long history as originally a pit stop for shepherds during their seasonal migration with the animals (transhumance). It invited a habit of mind with a strong sense of being part of a process that has lineage, where no keys exist and doors have always been open and everyone was always accepted. A habit where protection goes hand in hand with a sense of belonging and connection. This vision or educational philosophy holds, in my eyes, great promise for building a more sustainable future because it demonstrates that social, environmental and economic well-being must all be nurtured, and that means helping learners appreciate interconnections between human systems and natural systems and develop skills in working across disciplines. Working in a different paradigm from the old mechanistic one it accentuates the need to embrace uncertainty, constant change, paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguity. All will come to be seen as opportunities to develop our own understandings as we grope towards Sustainability.

One illustrative example of a paradox we had the chance to experience through the ‘Symbols’ and even more so in the ‘Tribes’ game is encapsulated in the expression of ‘Serious Games’, which I think both of these games could be described as. Gregory Bateson’s (2000)³⁾ theory of play specifies decision and play as two distinct forms of communication. In Luhmann’s organisation theory, according to Pors & Andersen (2015)⁴⁾, decisions are described as operations that seek to reduce undecidability. And in Bateson’s theory of play, he describes how play makes social contingency visible, thus drawing attention to the fact that decisions could have been made differently. The paradox we are facing in the case of serious games is that these almost antagonistic forms of communication: decision and play are held together.

A further paradox significantly fulfilled – though momentarily – through play is the entanglement of individual autonomy and larger necessity, as the poet F. Schiller has noted. Play unfolds from a person’s free choice about how to do what is necessary, and this opens up new possibilities in the process. It is not entirely fanciful, as Weber (2013) suggests, that the practice of what he terms ‘an enlivened economy’ “amounts to nothing less than the practice of a rich and playful life” (p. 53). He also adds to this a wider resonance, which I find particularly suited to the context of the Heterotopia Tour: it is the wisdom offered by Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins «If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right».

A final great learning for me came through the realization that the multiple devices such as ‘family groups”; “fishbowl”; “expression box” or “board for assembly” make us escape the tyranny of the present, the immediacy of everything immediately. And this is so, explains Meirieu (2008)⁵⁾ , because the present closes off any possibility to glimpse a future. And paradoxically, it is necessary to postpone the present to make the future exist: “no … not immediately! Do not act immediately … give yourself time to think!”. This is the function of all pedagogical devices articulated around the principles of deferment, such as J. Korczak's “mailbox” (1988), or the “council” in C. Freinet and in institutional pedagogy. And one thus reaches a form of relations with others that tolerate disagreement, non-resemblance, non-fusion, non-identification in the same leader. This is a path to access the “collective”. It necessitates accepting to get involved in an adventure inevitably more risky than that of the fusional group, since the identity of the members is not formatted in advance and not controlled permanently.

The role of the educators, which we therefore experienced as learners, was to allow us to work together on common tasks, despite our differences. Even more so: because of our differences. They made human groups exist which allowed the creation of the collective: where each and every one does not seek systematically that in which s/he is superimposed on the other, but what in which s/he differs from them, enriches them and in this way introduces distance. Distance from the other to myself which is also distance from me to myself. Because the other questions me and allows me, in the confrontation with them, to evolve, to “differ” from myself. I view this meeting with alterity as yet another ‘disposition’ that we acquired in this learning journey. Significantly, ‘alterity’ in this case encompasses both human and more-than-human. We touched upon this during our tour of the premises and our nature walks with Franca, where we were invited to take the point of view of the plants, which functioned as ‘others’ that make us see ourselves as others, invert our ways of relating to the more-than-human world and to our self and open up potentialities.