Learners’ Discomfort  

Learners might also be reluctant to try something so out of the ordinary. University students accustomed to receiving lectures and passing quizzes and tests with clear answers might find experiential dialectic learning in which they must craft their own questions very challenging. Agnotti Cowie, director of the Art & Social Change Program at InterPlay, says their work, which invites people to tune into their body sensations and to move and dance in front of others, really takes people outside of their comfort zone — which is scary for many people.  

Incrementality: One trick Cowie’s team uses to ease people is to start with very simple activities and incrementally give prompts and directions that will make participants take bigger risks. “Depending on how resistant a group or a person is, the more incremental you need to be,” she explains, starting with something easy. For instance, she says, when working with “professors, who like to talk, you start with the talking and storytelling forms and you might expand that a little more, a little more . . . and then maybe introduce a little bit of movement.” This concept of incrementality, she says, is “about breaking these big ideas or these big moments into smaller chunks so that they seem a little more attainable” and can be transposed to multiple contexts to work with resistant learners.  
 
Letting go: Cowie also admits that sometimes their work just doesn’t fit certain learners. But, she says, “That’s OK. That’s where they’re at, and it doesn’t have to be for everyone.” Scott agrees. Some of his programs aren’t a good fit for some people. Yet, he notes, often those who are most resistant at first grow the most through their experiences. Indeed, there’s a fine balance to find between encouraging participants to “stick with it” and letting them go. 

 
“Diploma disease” 

Learners are sometimes more obsessed with the idea of “getting a diploma” than with the pleasure of learning. As Munir Fasheh, wise elder of the Ecoversities Alliance, puts it, for some students “the only reason they go [to programs] is to get the certificate . . . because that’s the only thing [in which] they see value now.” On this note, Brumă Tristan reports on his visit to Swaraj University that “not only [does Swaraj not] have diplomas, but they playfully provoke the idea with a national campaign titled ‘healing ourselves from the ‘diploma disease.’”  

There are numerous reasons to offer cures for diploma disease. Diplomas tend to nurture extrinsic motivation instead of intrinsic motivation to learn. They are often linked to grading processes that insidiously promote competition over collaboration. To offer internationally recognized degrees, there’s a risk of falling into the homogenization trap that is an unintended consequence of widespread accreditation processes.  

The simple solution is to not offer diplomas, like Swaraj, but this sometimes makes it harder to attract resources such as financial support from governments and can make it harder to recruit participants, especially for extended programs.  

Getting accredited: Josefina Guzmán Días explained how her team at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Transmodernos really didn’t want to get accredited to give official diplomas, yet their learners were always asking for them to do so. Many years after their founding, the team finally took the accreditation route, thinking it might serve their learning community. Their team was surprised the Mexican government accepted their proposal for a transparadigmatic program for health professionals without requesting any major changes, and their programs will soon be accredited.  

Alternatives to diplomas: Beyond giving diplomas, there are many creative ways to recognize learners’ accomplishments upon completion of their programs. At the end of the Arts and Social Program at InterPlay, Cowie says, there is a big “playful” graduation ceremony during which participants’ accomplishments are celebrated through songs, rituals, and performances. During the event the facilitators give each participant an uplifting, playful, half-gibberish/half-English speech about the lessons they are invited to carry forward. This is just one example among many other practices that honor learners’ development in a spirit of community. 

Decolonizing our minds 

Another struggle that many ecoversities face is around decolonizing minds. Mandel and Amaro explain decolonization as “an invitation to address, explore, and unlearn the dimensions of oppression, power, and privilege that are part of our own lives, relations, tools, structures, histories, and beliefs.” This invitation is challenging, as it frequently involves recognizing one’s complicity in social and environmental acts of violence — as in, for instance, acknowledging that the batteries in our phones, cameras, and cars may well be linked to deforestation and expropriation of land by extractive industries. This invitation challenges learners to unlearn/deconstruct/disinvest beliefs and habits that are often deeply rooted in their identity.  

This notion of unlearning is central in some ecoversities like Swaraj University, writes Brumă: “Unlearning to overvalue institutionalized knowledge, to be controlled by your fears around money, to consume more than you need, to eat junk food, to produce waste, to undervalue the small . . . becomes the central means for young people to free their imaginations, create their place in the world, and give birth to a more just, sustainable, and beautiful world.” Yet this unlearning work is extremely complex and often met with lots of resistance. Furthermore, it’s not just challenging for participants, but it can also be one of the biggest struggles for organizing teams, as we’ll see next.   

 Working with affective capacities: 

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective people share that one of their greatest challenges is “disinvesting from their own investments in modernity and in recognizing their complicity” in social and environmental harm. The collective outlines the importance of developing one’s affective capacities to reorient desires away from the modern-colonial addictions. To do so the collective offers an array of social cartographies and pedagogical experiments that support “ways of being in the world [and] interrupting harmful patterns of existence.” For example, one of the collective’s frameworks, called SMDR (sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility), supports learners in seeking balance between desperate hope and reckless hopelessness. 

Meditation and attention: In his reflection on learning in different monastic settings, The pedagogy of the temple, member of the Ecoversities Alliance Dan Rudolph also nods to the power of meditations in the decolonization quest. Through different meditations, he says, “I was able to acknowledge many things that were holding me back and causing me to perpetuate harmful actions. Instead of ignoring or self-deprecating, I was able just to sit with them and realize the pain they were causing me and other living beings. [This] guided me to lessen harmful behavior and pursue more regenerative behaviors.” These meditation practices also helped him tune into what’s important and essential for his wellbeing and to adopt a simpler life with fewer material desires.   

Working across cultures 

In their work to counter “monoculture of the mind,” radical educational alternatives often strive to create bridges between different ways of knowing and being. Yet creating spaces for intercultural dialogue isn’t easy, as a cofounder of the Ecoversities Alliance, Alessandra Pomarico, notes: “Convening spaces of intense cohabitation is full of risk. Pain and trauma may resurge, along with frustrations, distress, questions of ego, questions of different paces, imbalanced energies, illusionary attachment to identity politics, external pressure, or [other] conditions.”  Pomarico says good intentions are not sufficient to bridge cosmologies; it takes a true commitment to overcome challenges together. She reminds us to expect hardship in hosting such spaces: “To ‘facilitate’ literally means to make things easier, but when sharing space with people from different knowledge systems or sets of privilege, to make things facile is rather a challenge.”  

Russell Sparks, indigenous-skills educator, notes that when working across cultures, especially indigenous cosmologies, there’s a fine line “between the well-worn habits of cultural appropriation and healthy cross-cultural exchanges.” In developing educational alternatives it can be very challenging to integrate these sets of knowledge without instrumentalizing them or over-romanticizing them. Sparks says that among the best practices in integrating indigenous knowledge into a learning system is “respecting the wishes of local indigenous people, asking permission to tend and harvest, and sharing the lineages and stories of where skills and crafts are learned — in many ways, engaging with the memories and healing of places and legacies. Unlearning the habits and frameworks of colonization is itself an expression of a healthy ecological system at work, as it helps transform relationships from extractive to reciprocal to regenerative.” 

Online gatherings offer an interesting opportunity to work across cultures, sets of knowledge, and ways of being, but as Mandel and Amaro point out, these online spaces come with challenges around finding a common language, finding moments to gather across time zones, and working with people who might have limited internet access.  

Intercultural translation: For those working across cultures, the concept of “intercultural translation” promoted by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos can be helpful. Mandel and Amaro describe this as creating spaces “where different forms of knowing and being in the world meet. It is a constant struggle and a point of awareness in Ecoversities . . . without silencing or fading the specificity of any [forms of knowledge].” This requires those in dialogue to have a deep humility about their knowledge, recognizing it as incomplete and accepting that it can expand only by opening oneself to receiving others’ wisdom. It requires a serious commitment from learners to care for one another in processes that value different forms of knowledge and different world views.   

Emergence: A lever for intercultural dialogues is to open spaces for emergence — as Mandel and Amaro put it, an “invitation to the unknown, allowing diverse ways of being, knowing, doing, relating to emerge. A sensibility whereby the whole is greater (and much more interesting) than the sum of its parts.” When one person or a small group plans a learning experience, it is of course colored with their ways of knowing and being. Thus, for successful intercultural dialogues, it’s important for all parties to co-create the agenda, even if it’s a long and messy process, as it is what will enable the emergence of activities that truly bridge different world views.  

Rituals & ceremonies: Alessandra Pomarico sees rituals and ceremonies as a great way to make people commit to working across cultures: Ceremony can invite people to commit to being together, she asserts. Ceremony “seals in the potency of the moment when people first gather with their different desires, apprehensions, questions, positions, languages, backgrounds, and paths of life, joining a circle that never was and never will be the same.”   

Intercultural exchanges: Working across cultures doesn’t happen overnight but requires deep immersion. Traian Brumǎ strongly recommends that those working to reimagine education take the time to visit other initiatives with radically different worldviews and approaches. One can partake in the regional/global gatherings or the online Reimagine Education Conferences, in which many members of the Ecoversities Alliance are involved. Through the Alliance one can apply for funding for a cross-learning residency at another ecoversity for an extended period. Even writing to leaders of other programs to arrange informal conversations can be enriching and eye-opening.  

Language barriers  

As languages go hand in hand with culture, many ecoversities report facing challenges while working with multiple languages. Mandel and Amaro point to the frustration of “[depending] on European colonial languages, mostly English as the lingua franca of the gatherings, with many times translation to Spanish and Portuguese,” while they would like to also value and use various indigenous languages.  

Hosken also emphasizes the importance of creating “language that doesn’t abuse nature,” as many mainstream (colonial) languages do. “People need to feel the horror of calling nature, Mother Earth, a ‘natural resource.’ Naming relatives in the large Earth community as ‘resources for human exploitation’ [perpetuates] industrial thinking.” Similarly, Jay Naidoo from the Earth Rise Collective reminds us that in many indigenous cultures “there is no concept of ‘environment’ amongst indigenous people because they don’t see a difference between themselves and the tree or the river; they see themselves as part of nature rather than apart from nature.”  

Encounters between these different languages—and the ways of being and knowing they impart — can contribute to shifting our worldview and the way we relate to our surroundings; thus many ecoversities have devised strategies to work with multiple languages. 

Translators: Having translators and interpreters can enable intercultural dialogues that couldn’t exist otherwise. As Mandel and Amaro point out, especially in virtual environments there is now “technological infrastructure to facilitate simultaneous oral translation.” Yet these tools need to be used carefully, with lots of patience and care from participants, making sure not to lose nuances and in-depth connections along the way.   

Working beyond words: Mandel and Amaro also point out the importance of honoring and valuing “the multiple things that are beyond words or that fail to be spoken, in ceremony, visionings, dances, somatic practices, walks in nature, or making arts together,” as these enable us to learn from different ways of being. 

Linguistic revitalization: Some ecoversities, report Mandel and Amaro, “engage in radically questioning the colonial, racist order that has led to the extinction of thousands of languages and the attack on those [who] have resisted and continue to narrate and name the world.” For instance, the EA Ecoversity, which offers culture-based higher education and career exploration for Native Hawaiians, has programs to revitalize the indigenous languages that were on the path to extinction. 

Rewor(l)ding: Some ecoversities hold the belief that “words world the world,” meaning the words we use affect the way we see the world, and by consequence, the way we inhabit it. As Pomarico puts it: “Words widen our imagination, they constitute our relations, open spaces of habitation, connect us with the unintelligible.” As they see language as iterative and evolving, these ecoversities don’t shy away from creating new terminologies that are the seeds of a new way of seeing and being in the world.  For instance, at Swaraj, instead of using the term learner, often associated with fill-the-vessel pedagogies, the community uses the term “khoji,” which alludes to someone who is seeking or investigating.   

Urgency and time scarcity 

Many members of the Ecoversities Alliance feel a sense of urgency to respond to the palpable threats of climate change and rising inequalities that threaten life on Earth. As Hosken says, “We want to move fast, we want to do stuff. You know it’s urgent; we should do more; we should scale up! [Yet] life unfolds according to the dynamics of life; a tree will grow in the time that it takes to grow a tree.”  

Members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective note, too, that there’s a danger in moving fast and aspiring to quick fixes and rapid solutions, as these often cause unintended consequences elsewhere. There is wisdom in the saying attributed to Báyò Akómoláfé, a scholar involved with the Alliance: “The times are urgent; we need to slow down.” This is reflected as well in the indigenous Seven Generations principle that reminds us that colonial and environmental harm have been ongoing for seven generations and we are to expect that it will take as many generations to undo the harm. Countless ecoversities practice or have proposed activities to help acknowledge and reconnect with past generations as well as invite learners to slow down. 

Deep democracy: The Blue Ribbon Movement, a youth-led organization that runs community-based projects to develop leadership among young people, has adopted a governance model inspired by indigenous communities in India, in which almost every decision regarding the movement is taken through consensus. This governance form, point out members of the movement Kejal Savla, Arnaz Khan, and Abhishek Thakore in “Re-imagining Power: Our Journey with Sarva-Anumati,” needs “investment of more time and energy to figure [what] works for all [as well as] patience to drop the urgency of ʻdoingʼ and immediately responding.” Patience is also key in transforming conflicts, building capacity to hold complexity, and integrating diverse viewpoints. Blue Ribbon leaders have adopted many strategies to ease the processes, including a probation period for new members and the ability to delegate a consensus decision to a smaller group when there’s an imperative for a quick decision. 
 
Embodying our vision 

Creating learning experiences that challenge mainstream approaches and narratives is not easy; it can be hard to embody our educational vision. Yet we must go beyond the vision, as Sharon Stein of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Future collective wrote in “Beyond Higher Education as We Know It,” an article in the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education: “Intellectual work might enable us to get to the edge of what is possible to imagine within our dominant epistemological and ontological frameworks and to articulate their internal limits and harmful effects, but it cannot, in itself, bring us somewhere different.”  

Prayerful action: In the spirit of embodiment, Scott says, prayerful action is a pillar of the programs at Weaving Earth Center for Relational Studies. Without religious association, prayerful action simply consists of undertaking small actions that are aligned with the greater change to which an individual aspires. These can be as simple as challenging one’s family on certain beliefs over supper to partaking in community organizing or political lobbying. As a pillar of Weaving Earth’s curriculum, “prayerful action affirms that the changes we seek necessitate our participation through sustained, daily work—which includes rest and play!”