Mieke Lopes Cardozo, Koen Wessels, Bas van den Berg, Michaela Hordijk, Marlies van der Wee, Daan Buijs, Arjen Wals, Naomie Tieks, and Sofia Sarmiento
Contemplations by a Community of Practice of Regenerative Higher Education in the Netherlands
This workshop introduces the main concepts of regenerative higher education from a practical and personal approach, deepening into the empirical experience of a group of higher education teacher-researchers in the Netherlands. In the workshop, the speakers introduce the experience of the Community of Practice in Regenerative Higher Education in the Netherlands in their practice of redesigning, reimagining and re-living educational stories. Going through a walked talk on their professional experiences and personal stories of hope, we invite participants to explore the regenerative potential of their educational practice and join in exploring and imagining the degree to which the regenerative design approach to education is and can be a transformative tool for creating systemic change – within and beyond education systems.
We share our collective learnings about using stories of hope through autoethnography and storytelling as systemic design interventions. We argue that reimagining and re-living educational stories inspired through a regenerative and hopeful perspective is an act of redesigning higher educational systems at multiple scales. Indeed, we are not just reimagining but aim to regenerate (higher) education through our collective community of practice interventions (Mang & Reed, 2020). In the last two years, this inter-university community and our entanglements as educator-researchers allowed for the emergence of a national masterclass in 2023 and a book project currently in development.
KEYWORDS: regenerative education, community of practice, autoethnography, storytelling, systemic design interventions
