Little School - Reflections on a week of collective learning
The Little School was a collective learning experience aimed at practitioners, community organizers, educators, care workers and cultural workers. It
creates a space for collective learning and exchange on topics such as environmental justice, health, and food sovereignty. A focus is put on
those practice-based, diverse forms of knowledges, that enable different relationships to the land, forests, water, biodiversity and the plants
that feed and heal us, while often being marginalised or not recognised as “valuable knowledge”. Over the course of one week, participants
took part in a variety of workshops for creative new methodologies and knowledge sharing.
The Little School. A Very Fertile Field
Text by Shelley Etkin
The week-long ‘Little School/Kleine Schule’ experiment was a world of worlds.
I could not recount it, but rather would like to invite you to imagine some of the questions, sensations, and strategies that emerged. By necessity of space and subjectivity, this will be an incomplete picture. Perhaps, as you read and imagine what may have taken place, you can join us in this practice:
value your own emergent sense-making.
What could a school be, beyond the ways we have been schooled?
How can we recognise learning when it’s happening?
How is knowledge generated together?
The sensations that meet the fingertips while reaching slowly towards the stem of the nettle, touching between hairs that release the burn, moving from the bottom up and negotiating the encounter.
The juicy prickle of a comfrey leaf.
A yellow flower that releases indigo dye when rubbed and transforms red when immersed in oil and memorizes the sunlight to make it available in darker times.
How do we transmit the specificity of our teachings, rooted in specific ancestries, lineages, and cultural contexts while opening them to this moment?
How to keep them protected and respected yet alive and dynamic?
How to open them to be experienced by the constellation present now, by a collective that carries many lineages?
We meet here, in this land while within & among & around us are so many other lands.
We are here to multiply, not to flatten.
We are here to absorb, not to consume.
We are here to resonate, not to replicate.
We are here to amplify, not to forget.
We are here together, while the topographies of power cascade between us, rising and falling in many...
Rhythms
Blindfolded steps on graveyard meadows accompanied by indications of orientation within disorientation.
Hands tapping on thighs and palms, of ourselves and others, feet stomping and jumping, voices calling out words of what we want to invoke, sequencing forwards and backwards.
The smells of cacao, cardamom, cinnamon, coffee, corn, chili, cumin and the ghosts that live among them…
How to focus on a common cause together while including our differences?
How far can I go with accepting differences that may challenge my principles?
How to deal with exclusion in ‘inclusive’ spaces?
Deviancy
The storm interrupts and takes center stage. We move from ground to sky, exposure to containment, and still the storm is everywhere. We close our eyes.
We are touching the floor with our stomachs, soles, and sit bones. We dare to ask questions that don’t have neat answers, that disrupt and displease and intrigue all at once. We let pauses have their space. We draw on top of each other's drawings.
The proposal of tasks and delivery of instructions brings us back to our beginnings – to the ways that we have been told what to do from a very early age, mostly in a world defined and regulated by adults. We recall those and bring them into the Now again and again to play with them, to negotiate them, to reflect together.
How to shift focus between what I am against and what I love?
What are different forms and roles of disruption? Of peace? Of tension? Intention?
What is the minimal agreement needed in order to be willing to show up for an experience?
What structures are being facilitated and how can we navigate those with our integrity in many ways?
Resonance & Dissonance
The breath that turns to hum that turns to tone that turns to all the tones at once. The water that memorizes the imprints of the flower’s offering to the emotional body. The pulse of age-old labor that other melodies and verses can ride on. The agreements and negotiations of how to traverse together through the other side of a grid. The spaces in between. The invisible power structures among everything.
What kind of stories do we want to tell?
What knowledge have you inherited from ancestors/friends/teachers?
What knowledge have you not paid attention to?
Who do we learn from?
We move
from dualisms to spectrums
We move around the room, around the garden, around the city
We move ourselves and others within the range of possibility
We move our comfort zones to the edges, reaching and receding like tides
We move our attention from root to stem to leaf to blossom to soil to neighboring growth to water
We move unseen politics lived on our bodies, stored in our cells
We have moved across vast and ranging territories, geographies, cultural landscapes
We have moved many
How to offer specific proposals and containers while allowing for whatever needs to emerge?
How to make space for multiple bodies and capacities inside any given frame?
What is collaboration? Collectivization?
What does it mean to share:
Resources
Plant medicines
Time
Attention
Teachings?
Those present in the room on these days are holders of other spaces where circulation of knowledges and practices are ongoing. How can this experience nourish and ripple outwards, not simply as a temporary experience, or an indulgence of self-care, nor as a reproduction of specific forms. How do these exchanges inspire the how(s) of facilitation methods in varying communities and contexts? This returns us again and again to the questions of how learning can take place and what is considered knowledge, inviting us to shape this in ways differently than we may have been schooled. We have responsibilities to carry these impulses and multiply them sensitively in other containers – to let them adapt, change, morph, reshape and transform, onwards and otherwise. These ways of being together are, perhaps in small and subtle ways, world-making practices in the subterranean space of pedagogical considerations.
This is certainly not limited to those who participated in the Little School/Kleine Schule, but extends here as an invitation to you.
What impulses can you take into your practices? How applicable are processes and principles of learning and knowing-together in the spaces you move through and hold? How might those interrupt and change our assumptions around how learning takes place, enabling other understandings to grow?
These questions are meant as bridges, as tunnels, as ramps, as stairwells, as loopholes, as elevators, as ropes to swing on and wormholes to slip through. They are meant to encourage and empower, to transport and challenge us, whoever this us includes, and may we let that expand and reconfigure. These impulses are meant to inspire and to trouble, with trust that each of you, each of us, have our own ways and spaces to work with these.
So, the question is then: what is possible when we all do that? What can education become?
***
Fanzines:
One of the outcomes of the Little School were five Zines that compile some of the processes, methodologies, learnings and unlearnings from the Little School experience.
The zines are meant to be shared and to further extend the invitation of the Little School and its participants and workshop-leaders to think education and learning through different practices, knowledges, principles, and processes, and to share them collectively.
You can access and review the zines online in the gallery.
The zines can also be downloaded in colour and in an easy-printable/greyscale version for free and for non-profit use only.
They must not be altered, and all credits must be acknowledged always.
The materials and texts from the zines have been written and compiled by the workshop givers.
Design for Decolonial Plant Knowledge: Abeni Asante
Design for Memories that inhabit us, Voz, Canto y Comunidad, Social Body Apothecary, and Sting me, bring me to the here and now: Aditi Kapur
