Transformative Learning Spaces coLAB

Designing  Transformative Learning Spaces: Workshopping Regenerativity

 By Invitation to AR+ Members Only. 

co-Stewards Hilary Bradbury, Lone Hersted and Andrea Rodericks.

We invite all AR+ members who are designing and facilitating learning spaces in support of regenerative and sustainable organizing to convene in a peer learning environment. Our intention is to help one another create more effective, more transformative, learning spaces in our work. Our intention is in learning from experience and to distill our insights in a way useful to self and others. In this series of workshops members are therefore invited to share their project as a short presentation to be followed by a round of reflective peer support. At the end of each session we will harvest lessons learned and key principles.

Workshops convene on the last TUESDAYS of the month. 

Start time alternates between 08.30 AM and 16.00 UTC to suit timezones.

  • We welcome ALL AR+ members who are interested in taking a workshopping slot to share briefly about their own work and focal challenge(s).  
  • As the sharing must be brief, a facilitator will meet in advance with the presenter to help focus. The case facilitator will be responsible for setting time and sharing any advance materials in a timely fashion.
  • Notes from each workshop are shared as blogs, sometimes with video snippets are available at the bottom of this webpage. 

What to expect

During each session a member will work with an issue prepared in advance with their selected facilitator.  We imagine each case can be discussed at least twice – first in depth for learning about “current state & aspiration” and later with a briefer update on which feedback was useful, i.e., which experiments worked and which did not work.

Our process guide is intended to use our time well!

  • We'll spend 55 minutes on the case. 
  • Preparation is done outside each session with the facilitator and participant-protagonist meeting at least once to clarify the challenge of their case. We expect a rotation of protagonist-participants and facilitators. 
  • In session, following a settling period, the protagonist offers a short presentation to clarify 1) the intention of the work 2) key stakeholders, 3) a vignette to illustrate working dynamics. 4) The presentation ends with their challenge and invitation to others to reflect on.  
  • Participants (often within breakout trios) discuss their experience of the challenge in their own work, e.g., how they have met a similar challenge with success (or not). We are careful not to imagine we give advice to the protagonist. Instead we locate a similar challenge in our own domain and seek to learn from that both for ourselves, with others in the spirit of a peer consultation. From that reflection may come possible insights to be shared.
  • The protagonist receives participant feedback and offers their own reflection on what has been useful. Importantly they may clarify a next experiment for their work based on what they've heard.
  • In the remaining time, we harvest lessons and key principles - noting links across cases - before adjourning.

Holding the Whole

In this work, and in keeping with the spirit throughout our AR+ eco-system, we learn and practice as developmental friends to one another. Our evolving knowledge about better designed learning spaces - and how to ensure them - will help support Action-oriented Researchers for Transformation (ART), ourselves and a next generation of ARTists.


Highlight blogs, video snippets and notes below...

1. Starting up. Lone Hersted invites us to consider which creative activities would you bring to a corporate environment interested in regenerative organizing. Lone is working with a group of middle managers who have volunteered to explore and support the concept and practice of “regenerative organizing.”  How would any of us best start in such a scenario? How to pay attention to gaining traction? Read & listen in!

2. Bridging and connecting. Ruth Foerster invites an inquiry into effectively creating bridges between 1. managers and executives, 2. managers with their own "private" concerns, 3. business goals and larger systems. Having designed a kick off workshop Ruth invites others to reflect with her about how to seed first, second and third person action research across relational, conceptual and experimental spaces. Read and listen in

3. Are we White Supremacists? Astrid Kunnert's INQUIRY invites  us into issues of identity and race.  reflecting on her work in Kenya, she asks, how do we work, choicefully and ethically, with identity issues that arise among stakeholders? Can we manage better when identities - e.g., regarding race - are difficult to discuss.  Read and listen/look in.

4. Stepping from Practice into Scholarship with Luea Ritter who asks how to explain the what of the how! Luea is energized to articulate insights and embodied experiences from her work into meaningful language. While already well grounded in contributing to eco-social transformation through hosting and stewarding long-term and intentional work fields, now Luea feels called to want to explain the HOW we do WHAT we do. Read Luea's reflections.

5. Facilitation as developmental weaving. Read Patricia Canto's reflections on her work with Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness since 2019.

6.  Carol Gorelick's workshop focused on intergenerational learning and supporting action research among students in professional schools.   The challenge she named concerns the needs of a new generation of action researchers who want something different from conventional academic models of support. Her vision is of more higher ed programs producing more people with more impact. How might more be supported in the practice of Action - Research - Reflection - Continuous Feedback. Listen/look in, read the notes.

7. Susanna Carman's challenge concerns emerging a next generation of transformative partnership. Susanna wondered how such partnership might develop after being nurtured into being. She finds there is an internal tension between being the weaver of connectivity AND the facilitator of transformations. How does her work continue?! Read Susanna's reflection on our workshop. 

8. Dana Carman and Heidi Gutekunst presented their transformative work at a British bank. The challenge is how it may succeed in proliferating into the whole system. Listen/Look in, read the notes.

9. Naia Begiristain presented her PhD research project based in the “New Political Culture Think Tank” of the Basque Institute of Competitiveness and the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa. Between 2020 and 2023, the project aimed to enhance collaborative governance networks. The deliberation process included policy makers, territorial agents, and researchers. All had to learn, together, how to overcome dilemmas on their path to shared governance. Listen/Look in, read the notes.

10. Andrea Rodericks presented her work with an NGO in Bangladesh which produced wonderful insights on shifting roles and power sharing, while maintaining integrity of the learning space amidst shifting dynamics among stakeholders. 

Teaching & Education Co-Lab

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