ABSTRACT
Hot Seat: I would like to kick off this conversation by sharing an image that I’ve been carrying with me for quite a while. A part of this image popped up recently during a training session for teachers within my university. In this session, we did a meditation exercise in which we were asked to look at Earth from a distance, imagine we were going to land on Earth for the first time, and then visualize what forms of education ’want to be birthed’ on this precious planet. We were invited, in other words, to quite radically re-imagine the potential of education. The images that emerged for me were very playful and outdoors. I did not image school buildings but, rather, a more free, playful, immersed form of learning in and with nature. Now, as soon as we started imaging again just before this conversation, similar images started emerging again, and this time they reminded me of the garden of Eden, and the biblical story of how humanity left the garden of Eden and ended up living in a very special city. I mean, whether you’re religious and of Christian faith or not, I think there is something very relatable in this story. It’s about free, flourishing life (the garden) and organised, structured humanity (the city), and about the question of their relationship. You see, I think the crux of our work – and that is what my imaging was about – is to see the potential of both garden and city, of both human-made systems and freely flowing natural life. More specifically, I think regenerative education work is in many ways about how we can create ’garden-like qualities’ from within the city. I see this as a lemniscate 3 (figure 4), where the potential of garden and city are interconnected, together resembling the ongoing challenge of living together, becoming more fully alive in relationship to each other, human and more-than-human.
