I am still fairly vibrating with the inspiring sessions, ideas and conversations at last week’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, an annual gathering of ‘farmers, growers, activists, policymakers and researchers from around the world who are interested in transforming our food system.’ This year more than 3500 attended on-site and online, with standing room only in most Oxford-based sessions. It is understating it to say that the energy at the event is palpable – it is vibrant, effervescent and flourishing!
I was very fortunate to be part of two sessions this year:
Learning From the Land and its Workers – Agroecology as Pedagogy? With Ian Rappel, Director of the College for Real Farming and Food Culture and Rachel Phillips, Director of Education at the Apricot Centre in Devon, England
*and*
Conscious Leadership for Local, Regenerative Food Systems with Katie Palmer, Founder and Programme Manager at Food Sense Wales; Alejandra Balcazar and Adriana Puech, Co-Directors of Efecto Mariposa, Colombia; Eliane Cohen, Founder of Siendo Naturaleza, Peru; and Alice Jervoise, Programme Officer at UNDP’s Conscious Food Systems Alliance.
Although different in their focus, the two sessions both engaged all participants in an open-forum conversation about the intersections of regenerative frameworks, education, and ecological and agroecological principles. Turning the formal format of a panel session on its head, we opted to engage our audiences (each in full-to-capacity meeting rooms (!!)) in dialogue while we helped to shape and guide conversations – recognising the diversity of expertise and collective wisdom in the room.
Topics ranged from the imperative to create more space and time for curiosity and wonder to making the invisible visible to framing centres for learning as communities of practice and ‘life projects’ (as explained by Eliane and her work in Peru) that build relationships with human and more-than-human communities through embodied practices from the soil outward.
As more of us recognise the urgent need to transition educational programmes to more equitable, accessible, diverse and ecologically focused models, it’s also important to recognise that we are on a collaborative journey together – and the strength of our evolving network. ‘It’s no sense being a finger if you don’t have a hand’, as Alejandra shared – and critical to shape the stories we tell one another, as Katie expressed, to amplify and share and help us live into a reimagined future for education.
With these partners and many others and under the aegis of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance, we are developing a truly globally distributed learning curriculum co-created from the ground-up with the help of a global Network of Local Hubs, to facilitate an equitable exchange of knowledge and experience for food systems practitioners of diverse backgrounds to develop the inner capacities needed to build regenerative and conscious food systems at grassroots level. The programme will be built of a series of dynamically interlinked modules offered both online and facilitated at site-based practice centres in locations around the world with plans to pilot the programme in 2024.
The open forum of the Agroecology as Pedagogy session ranged widely through higher education, practical training and skills development, knowledge sharing, schools, lifelong learning and more. Rachel’s exciting work at the Apricot Centre supporting learners through funded Level 2, 3 and 4 programmes in Regenerative Land-Based Studies is an exemplar of practice-led and embodied learning – resolutely community-focused and ecologically-centred.
We opted to model the kind of co-creative and iterative regenerative process in the very structure of the sessions, with the hope it could extend beyond these focused workshops and inspire participants to more broadly engage in practice-led learning.
The ORFC’s cross-sector, interdisciplinary focus on agroecology makes it an ideal community to share and work through regenerative frameworks and processes – as they are building on similar principles, including:
- Equitable knowledge and experience sharing
- Decentralising power
- Community cooperation
- Connection to place
- A commitment to biodiversity
- Social transformation
Robert Rodale helped to popularise the term regenerative when he coined the term ‘regenerative organic agriculture’ in the 1980s, noting that we need to think and act ‘beyond sustainability, to renew and to regenerate our agricultural resources’. Regenerative organic agriculture, he wrote, ‘takes advantage of the natural tendencies of ecosystems to regenerate when disturbed.’
Among the more than 100 sessions, panels and workshops at ORFC were many inspiring examples of initiatives – both emergent and established – that showcase where we have begun to shift to more resilient and regenerative models of food production, outreach, activism, farming, education and more. In education, the conference highlighted learning approaches that are shared across a network of aligned organisations, where we can aspire to develop more equitable, accessible and democratic approaches to learning by leveraging the power of diversity in a dynamic and de-institutionalised network built on ecologically-focused, community-centred and practice-led learning.
We highlighted three core elements of regenerative learning – ecology, community, and practice – that interweave to form a flexible framework for learning and encourage emergent networks of schools, colleges, businesses, charities and other organisations to co-create a distributed and decentralised network that is always learning, evolving and in the process of becoming.
Such a network engages a diversity of voices, perspectives, ecological, socioeconomic, cultural and political contexts, and forms a lattice that fosters learning, which (to borrow from my own chapter in Transformative Learning), enfolds, refolds, reintegrates, generates, regenerates and spirals both inwards and outwards in an energetic dance that supports the whole while expanding outward to create new community clusters wherever tendrils of learning reach into new places, take root and flourish.
As my RLN colleague and DesignED 4 Resilience Founder Maggie Favretti writes in her book Learning in the Age of Climate Disasters, ‘Regenerative learning re-roots us and reacquaints us with our natural capacities and relationships, where we can belong and feel whole again.’
Regenerative Learning Network 