Integrating Transformative Education and ART – George Pór
George Pór of Campus Co-Evolve writes: “I’m experiencing my life as ongoing action research flowing in recurring cycles of 1st-person contemplative practices, a great variety of 2nd-person relational practices, and 3rd-person practices of architecting social structures, where people can grow embodying all three persons.
A recent example of such structures is Campus Co-Evolve, a virtual university for evolutionary agents. Action Research has been a life-giving force of the Campus since its very inception. Inspired by Hilary Bradbury’s Action Research for Transformation framework, we explicitly embedded ART in our “From Me to We to All of Us” (MWA) learning journey (aka “course”), last June, at the same time when we established Future HOW, the Centre of Action Research for Evolutionary Emergence, associated with the Campus.
In Module 3 of the MWA journey, learners formed ART teams to research and engage with the real-world challenges of transformative social movements, such as the commons movement, transformative education, reinventing healthcare, Otto Scharmer’s Global Activation of Intention and Action (GAIA), and Regenerative Culture, Economics and Agriculture. The underlying idea was to find a group within each movement interested to work with us as their ART partner.
The cohort studied A call to Action Research for Transformations: The times demand it and the 7 quality choicepoints for action oriented research for transformations, and made some initial contacts with the movement organizers. The course ended before our learners had enough time to develop their respective ART projects, but the graduates formed a self-organizing ART Collective, where they assist each other’s evolution as ARTists, while continue working on various projects.
We are about to launch a new, 5-module learning journey into Protopia, where ART will be part of each module. If you want to learn about how we’ll do that and provide your feedback/feedforward, please join us in the Open House, on Saturday, 27-Feb-2021, 3 pm UK time. If you read this blog later than that, you can share your questions and ideas in the Comments section below or contact Anna Betz, our Co-Director at anna@campus-coevolve.org.”