What is Regenerative Education?

I recently participated in three inspiring education-related events - a workshop on Pedagogies of Possibility organized by Queen Mary University's Critical Hope Collective, a keynote at Bristol University's Institute for Teaching and Learning annual conference and an anti-conference on regenerative design education, also in Bristol. I also did an interview for a Georgetown University's Red House research project. In all four events regenerative education came up, which is a practice that strongly resonated with my own interest in critical-creative pedagogies. Because regenerative pedagogy might be quite new to many educators, in this blog post I present some of its features and some practical resources for teaching regeneratively.

Image source: James Norman for anti-conference

Like other emancipatory strands of education, regenerative education goes beyond transfering knowledge to building and nurturing relationships between learners, communities and the living world. It invites students to become co-creators of knowledge through the lenses of ecology, civic engagement and relational well-being, as well as their own experiences in the world. It is deeply place-based and makes universities' physical and social locations an integral part of teaching and learning.

Beyond sustainability

Importantly, regenerative education moves beyond sustainability. In my book Creative Universities, and especially chapter 5 on Repairing Ecologies, I presented a critique of sustainable development and argued for a shift from education for sustainable development (commonly refered to as ESD) to sustain-ability education, building on the work of Tony Fry (for whom the hyphen makes visible human responsibility to sustain, or indeed contribute to regenerating life in its interdependent wholeness.)

Regenerative education goes beyond ESD and even sustainability by shifting from minimizing harm to prioritizing repair, restoration, renewal and ultimately the flourishing of ecosystem. Where ESD focuses on reducing ecological footprints or mitigating damage, regenerative approaches emphasize the capacity of education to contribute to restoring social and ecological systems. This shift involves a reorientation from extractive models that treat learners and knowledge as isolated units to generative models that recognize learning as a collective, participatory and situated process. Rooted in principles drawn from regenerative design, deep ecology and systems thinking, regenerative education seeks to cultivate learners who are not only informed citizens but regenerative agents who can perceive patterns, understand interdependence and build resilience.

Image source: https://shoreditch.works/regenerativehub/

Opening up the classroom

Because it foregrounds practical and community-engaged learning, regenerative education also provides opportunities to rethink the space of the university classroom. Such project-based learning - or learning by doing together as I like to think of it - which can take place in collaboration with external organizations, and reflective inquiry that asks students to understand themselves as embedded within larger social-ecological networks. It can also involve hands-on ecological stewardship and a great example of this is the Forest Food Garden at Sussex university, a dedicated green space on campus where successive cohorts of students plan and plant a food garden whil learning about civic ecology and climate change.

A short video introducing the Sussex university Forest Food Garden

Expanding student learning

Regenerative education also incorporates the development of students' emotional and relational competencies, including empathy, deep listening and critical hope as integral dimensions of learning. Rather than a siloed space, the classroom becomes an ecological and social node within a wider web of relationships. It calls for assessment methods that capture the growth in students' understanding of systems thinking, their community engagement and holistic well-being. As such, it challenges dominant metrics of success and thereby seeks to reform educational content, broaden pedagogical practice and alignwith the needs of and for regenerative futures.

Practical resources

In the book I present examples of four shifts that are necessary for sustain-ability or regenerative education. For this I drew on the work of Fritjof Capra and Donella Meadows, whose book Thinking in Systems: A Primer is a great introduction to systems thinking for students:

• from objects to relationships

• from contents to patterns

• from linearity to non-linearity

• from parts to whole.

This means more emphasis on collaborative and experiential learning. Regenerative education shifts the goal of education from individual achievement to collective thriving. It asks: What kind of people and communities do we need to cultivate in order to regenerate our world? It involves students through hands-on environmental work, community projects or collaborative design challenges, through which they can learn to become agents of transformative actions towards restoring ecosystems and strengthening social ties.

In my book, which has lots of practical examples, I present serious games and campus mapping as two examples, and in the resource section of this website there is an activity guide for students to experiment with different food-related practices to learn experientially about the multiple impacts of their food choices and the food webs in which their consumption implicates them. At the QMU workshop, Alessandro Merendino presented the Beyond Sustainability Toolkit.

If you are interested in learning more, here is an article by fellow educator Mieke Lopes Cardoso who led a regenerative education program at the University of Amsterdam (I recorded a TeachTalk with Mieke back in 2021), an article focusing on regenerative collaborations in HE and an article on regenerative inquiry.