M: The Transition Movement is growing in all 50 States right now. How is Gaia University related to the Transition Movement?
A: Well, we come from the same genesis if you like. We both come from the Permaculture and ecovillage movements that have been operational over the last 30-35 years or so. Rob Hopkins who initiated the Transition Towns movement in Totnes in Devon in England is a friend of mine, a permaculture colleague and indeed we worked on a couple projects together. And I too am from Totnes, so it’s sort of like historic sets of connections. I think probably both the Transition Towns movement and Gaia University have come about because we see that the mainstream is very slow to take up new thinking. Extraordinarily slow. The mainstream – the time it takes for new thinking to get it into the mainstream education world for example is legendarily lengthy. It can take them 20 years to mull over a new concept, as it were. And so both the Transition Towns movement and Gaia U. are forms of gathering people together to ginger up the mainstream processes. It’s like we’re sort of saying that we don’t have time to wait for the mainstream to catch up. In fact we’re going to go out in front, we’re going to take a leading place, go to a leading place and draw the mainstream forward.
M: Have all of the Project Design Advisers that work with Associates (students) gone through the Transition Town Training, or do they come from different but complementary backgrounds?
A: Well a mixture, yeah. We’ve got some people who have done the Transition Town training and are formally registered as Transition Town trainers now, and then we have a lot of people who are very expert permaculture designers, ecovillage designers and so on. So it’s like a mixture of people. And the advice and tutoring that we give to people is in 2 separate containers. One major piece of advice that we give to people has to do with specific learning issues that come up for a person. We all have a lot of distress around learning usually, that we’ve acquired over the years, and we often need someone who can help us process when we get blocked, when we get stopped, stuck and so on. So we have what we call Process Advisors and they’re role is to assist people to think about their learning process. To think about how they are going to build their portfolio, because a portfolio is a very important part of the evidence that a person generates to show what they’ve learned and what their achievements have been.
So portfolio building and how they document and so on is a critical piece. And also to think about their sort of collaboration approaches… who they could use to help them construct their meaning of the very complex situations that people who are working in the field come across.
Now the skills that a person needs for doing that, are not necessarily the skills of being a Transition Towns person or a Permaculture person or an ecovillage person. They just need to be a really good action learner themselves who have good counseling skills. The other tutorial bucket is the expert, the specialist advisor tutoring, which is where we would use people who have specific trainings which are relevant to the work the student or associate’s seeking to do.
M: As far as the Transition Movement then, do most ecovillages and permaculture projects automatically fit in with that? I guess I wasn’t sure how cohesive or formalized the movement was.
A: Yes, that’s a good question… One of the ways I like to look at it is that, you know if you’re developing computer operating systems, what happens is you issue a version of a system and it functions for a couple of years. Meanwhile a third party will write little extra bits for it and so on and so forth. And every now and again the people who look after the operating system issue a completely new version. It goes up to version 10 from version 9 and so on and so forth. So you can sort of see the Transition Towns movement as being a very brilliant reconfiguration of all of the previous progressive work that’s been done, not just in the Permaculture movements and the ecovillage movements, but you could go back further and say that this is a recreation of the energy that was around in the 1840’s, where there was a tremendous progressive upsurge of new legislation and early development of health systems, working men’s learning institutes and all of that sort of stuff. I think it’s healthy and useful for us to see ourselves in this long history of progressive movements that arise from time to time when the need is there. And I think now, all of the previous progressive movements have done tremendous work and made really big impacts on the planet. And now it’s time for another one. The Transition Towns movement is the next swell forward of this huge progressive energy that’s been around for centuries.
M: Many people in the US are starting to realize that “society as we know it” is not what we thought it was. How do you see the nature of modern work in the United States changing in the next 5-20 years?
A: Yes, I think that’s a really important zone. I think we’ve seen the last generation, or we’re just seeing the end of that generation that wind up at the end of their working lives with guaranteed salary related pensions or that sort of thing. And I think we’ve seen the end of homogenous careers, where somebody might in their early 20’s settle on a profession and then continue in that profession for 45-50 years or so. I think that’s more or less an old paradigm now, and what we’re seeing is we’re seeing the emergence of the portfolio worker, who’s looking for a bit of independence now. They’re less inclined to want to be employed, and more interested in being more self-directed in their lives. And in a sort of contradictory way, whilst people are looking for this self-directed way of being, they’re also looking for a way to function in community… to develop themselves around effective, close, organized, and coherent community. So there is a big change, a big shift happening. And this has been going on for awhile.
It changes the cluster of skills that people need to be thinking about acquiring. At Gaia U. we like to re-language things, so we speak about “skill flexes” rather than skills sets. We think about encouraging our associates to develop a wide skill flex, or sort of like a meta-level of skills, largely around learning and unlearning. Whatever the world and their circumstances require them to learn about, they feel confident that they can self-direct their learning in that new field. So if they need to learn how to weld, they don’t regard that with terror, they can work out a good strategy for doing that and so on. Or if they need to learn how to be a superb pruner of old orchard apple trees, they would understand that that’s very learnable, and they could do that and so on. If they need to learn how to be able to do intellectual activity and put together complex thinking and so on, that they could also do that as well.
We talk about people having very adaptable, self-directed self-employment skill flexes. That they can shift… and be resilient.
One element that’s been very significant for us is to see the transition processes that many people are going through. What we notice is that people who go through transition, are very reluctant transitioneers. It’s not until they have a car accident or they lose their job or the stock market crashes or something like that. Then they might make a reluctant transition.
And then we notice that after people have made perhaps a reluctant transition, next time the transition comes around, if they’ve had some good support in the first one, they might take the next transition with less reluctance (less resistance) and a bit more eagerness. And then in the third level, people are looking for it. They’re saying, hmm, what’s emerging for me in the world next? Where am I going to go and what am I going to be doing? And so on… so people come to be proactively seeking change, rather than reluctant around change. And I think that’s a very important skill flex to have in the new world. It fuses ones work with ones life… with excitement and an enthusiasm and a joy engaging with personal transformation. For example, one of your major skills might be that you’re a good tutor or Specialist Advisor for people who are in transition. Everybody in the world now needs to be thinking about their transition from this old false economy that we’ve just noticed is falling apart, into the new economy. The new localized, community-based generally small-scale federated economy, that’s where we all need to learn to go. And that’s a big transition.
M: Are all life transition’s fodder for a degree with Gaia University? To what extent is the school’s curriculum or scope really geared towards hands-on projects like cob-building, permaculture systems design, urban planning, and to what extent can you take in studies in the arts, say, or counseling?
A: You can do those things too. So, usually for example, well…. You know like in the conventional world, things like graduating out of high school, graduating with your Bachelor’s degree, getting your Master’s degree and going on to your Doctorate. These all could be seen as significant rites or passage and significant transitions in your life. So that’s one way of looking at the Gaia University structure, the way we think about using the degree structure. We see each of those changes as being points at which a person gains in independence and gains in their ability to understand the world and gains in their ability to be conscious about their learning and unlearning, strengths and weaknesses and so on.
And so when somebody comes to do a Gaia University Masters degree for example, it’s a 2 year program, if they’re in a position like yourself where they’re not quite sure about what they want to do and this that and the other, we would support you being in that chaotic phase and invite you to write that up as your, what we call Graduate Diploma. So you’d be journaling it and describing the difficulties and the delights of it and what strategies you were looking at to think about what comes next and what you’d like to try and who do you know who could help you out.
So then by the time you approach your second year, it’s quite likely that things have shaped a lot for you. And you can see that what you want to do is to develop some existing skills that you’ve got in urban planning, and you definitely want to do a natural building course and go on and spend some time working with cob builders or whatever. So it’s like you create a program that suits yourself. And then of course we do have people who are very focused on a topic, and that’s really interesting too because… you see, we see the learning approach that people take in Gaia U as having both an inner and outer transformational function. So the person is both looking to explore themselves at the inner level to see what’s getting in the way of their learning and so on and so forth… to find out what their vocation is and their passion is and so on. So we expect the person to change during the course of their work with us, and we expect them to be changing the world too. So that they’re engaged in something and active out there… So maybe they’re working to support a lawyer who’s providing legal services to underprivileged people in difficult parts of Africa. Or…
We expect the urban planner, for example, not only to be engaged in urban planning, but also to be working out what it is that stops them collaborating across departments in their planning department, or something like that. What’s going on in the culture of their organization that makes it difficult for the organization to connect with the public around urban planning issues, let’s say.
M: Gaia University is coming up with a way to give credit for things that people have been doing for a long time, like building with mud. It almost seems like you could give retroactive credit to whole indigenous villages. Maybe they haven’t produced the portfolio necessarily, but if you reward the outputs and not necessarily the classes they’ve taken…
A: Yes absolutely, yeah. And that’s one of our visions, in fact, is that the Gaia University system can accommodate informal learning – that is learning that has taken place outside the conventional classroom setting, really. And in fact one of our graduates, our recent graduates, is just working now with the United Nation’s Traditional Knowledge Initiative, TKI, over in NE Australia, where the indigenous people have got some extraordinarily well-developed long-term, you know millennia long-term, water catchment strategies on board, and what he’s doing with our degree structure is he’s using to bring the knowledge that indigenous people have got forward by supporting the indigenous people themselves to go through the Gaia University process.
So what they do is they convert their informal historic learning into something slightly more conscious, so they’ll have to report on what it is they know, and how they’ve come to know it, and what experience they have with it and so on and so forth.
Michel Foucault writes about “subjugated knowledges” where university professors and researchers and so on are reluctant to imagine that anybody else besides them have any significant knowledge. And it’s not until they themselves have discovered the knowledge and rearticulated it and turned it into doctoral programs, and this that and the other, that they think that the knowledge is legitimate. There has to be this long process. And of course in this process a lot of knowledges are ignored completely.
White intellectuals would imagine that aboriginal elders don’t really have the knowledge that could be doctoral level, or could make a learning field. It’s very difficult for Westerners to get to that sort of place really. So part of the Gaia University mission is to turn that right around and say well now we can in fact start articulating these previously subjugated knowledges and bring them more apparently into the world so that they have their proper place of influence…
You too will have experienced the oppression of your experience and knowledge having been subjugated, not been valued in some way. And the part of the Gaia U process for a person like yourself is to provide you with a space in the beginning of the program to fully articulate your learnings and your process and so on. Your 1/3 credit is your story. So what happens is that your story now has an academic legitimacy, whereas previously it was just your story. So the same process for the NE aboriginal community in Australia on a large scale, it would be happening for each of us on an individual scale. Actually being able to tell our stories, and tell what it is - where did the significant learnings happen in our lives? What happened when we shed that particular attitude and value that has proven to be dysfunctional? What new opportunities arose when we stopped thinking like that and started thinking in a different way?
In this moment of planetary transition, these learnings are crucial to the understanding of how we’re going to add to the new sets of conditions that are coming up behind us really fast.
M: My last question: Can you comment about choosing IMCA Socrates as your accreditation body.
A: Well, in what Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) called the banking model of education, you see your students as an empty bank account that you need to fill up with credits as it were, in order for them to qualify. We’re not doing that. People come already full – of knowledge and information and learning and so on. And we put them together with other people and have them create meaning and advance their learning as a sort of like a collective process in many ways. So that’s so far outside of the conventional accreditation world, that that’s why we eventually came to IMCA, we eventually found the IMCA who was doing this action learning, somewhat less transformational than what we’re doing, but nonetheless they understand the nature of action learning, and they also understand the nature of being uncomplicated. Which is something that conventional accreditation systems do not understand.
| There’s a man named Bridges who wrote a book on transitions called
Managing Transitions, Making The Most of Change. What he says about
transitions is that people very rarely give themselves enough time in
the bumpy chaotic period of exploration. Which is where you are right
now, you’re in this bumpy period. What he would say to you is… yeah,
take some jobs, by all means take a little short-term job to keep your
finances going and hold your end up at home and all that sort of stuff.
But don’t necessarily see that as a beginning of a career yet. If it
hasn’t become clear to you yet, what it is that you want to do next,
then just take temporary stop-gap work to keep your finances fine. And
maybe you could find a way of doing that in a very interesting way and
so on. And you look at those as learning experiences, part of your
exploration of what is life like out there. And then you allow enough
time for the new beginning to make itself really clear to you. So there
is a new beginning for you somewhere, not very far away, it just hasn’t
yet made itself apparent. |
