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. One month 08.30 AM universal coordinated time and 16.00 the next to suit timezones.

  • On last TUESDAYs 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 with video snippets (see end 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. INQUIRY: Lone Hersted invites us to consider which creative activities would you bring to a corporate environment interested in regenerative organizing. Specifically, there’s a group of middle managers who have volunteered to explore and support the concept and practice of “regenerative organizing.” You’ve agreed to pilot some work with them for a few months in the hopes it gains traction.  How do you best start?! Read & listen in!

2. Bridging and connecting. INQUIRY with Ruth Foerster: How to effectively create bridges between 1. managers and executives, 2. managers with their own "private" concerns, 3. business goals and larger systems. Specifically there is a kick off workshop that will seed first, second and third person  action research across relational, conceptual and experimental spaces. Read and listen in

3. Are we White Supremacists. INQUIRY with Astrid Kunnert concerns issues of identity and race.  How do we work, choicefully and ethically, with identity issues that arise among stakeholders. Especially when those identities are difficult to discuss, e.g., regarding race.  Read and listen/look in.

4. Stepping from Practice into Scholarship. INQUIRY: How to explain the what of the how! Luea Ritter asks: "How to bring insights and embodied experiences from my work on the ground into meaningful language and articulation. While I am well grounded in contributing to eco-social transformation through hosting and stewarding long-term and intentional work fields, I 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 problem is that many a new generation of action researchers need something different from conventional academic models of support. The Vision is more higher ed programs producing more people with more impact, more grounded in practice of: Action - Research - Reflection and Continuous Feedback. Listen/look in, read the notes.

7. Susanna Carman's challenge with emerging a next generation of transformative partnership. Specifically 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 this continue?! Read Susanna's blog in reflection on the session. 

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.


Teaching & Education Co-Lab

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