Our learning community model as emerged with our learners and faculty over the past 10 years as we practiced what it means to become a self-renewing learning community of care.

As we take stock on what has been planted, seeded, cultivated and now cross pollinating- several of our alumni have taken the learning they have designed with mentors in our model, and now have created unique holistic learning communities in more than seven locations around the world: including Beijing, Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Winnipeg, New Zealand, British Columbia, and Austin.

Now we are leveraging what we have learned as we evolve to the next
level—leading the movement of learning communities. Our programming offers the opportunity to explore your own curiosity, answer your own questions, and follow your own enthusiasms—within our learning community.

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Transformative Learning (TL): How are we defining and living it?

Drawing from transformative, holistic, integral, contemplative and indigenous
ways of knowing, we embrace TL through the metaphor of a traveller exploring a landscape…a living system of understandings that emerge in the exploration process…Where the path emerges in the walking. Walking with your mentors and fellow learners, you explore your wonderings individually and collectively. This supports an individualized process where you can join where you need to join, drawing on your own strengths and questions as you travel through the landscape.

Our programming offers the opportunity for learning in community, acknowledging a tension between two learning paradigms: self-authored and nested in an intentional TL community. You experience inquiry-based learning within the power of conversation and connection with your mentors and community.

We believe:

The learner is not only a consumer of third-person knowledge. Learning from a first- and second- person perspective in real-world contexts puts the “learner into the driver’s seat of profound societal change” (Sharmer, 2018). Deepening self-knowledge can occur through the inquiry-based process of wonder, explore, design, apply.
Embodied, experiential learning allows for the ‘movement of the inner place of learning from the head to the heart, and from the heart to the hand”. Building on that we see the cultivation of profound learning relationships to nature and to social fields as gateways to the deeper sources of knowing (”the fourth teacher”). (Sharmer, 2018b, p. 5)
Systems literacy is central to Generating Collective Wisdom; learners must learn methods to make the system see and sense itself. This is the core capacity to unlock collective creativity (Sharmer 2018) ; “all societal sectors go through similar institutional changes: from perpetuating systemic silos to cultivating generative social field in the context of their eco-systems. Learners need to be literate in facilitating this shift.”
Mentors and co-learners can support “Tend the Fire: To patiently elicit and draw out the unique qualities and expression of each person with perseverance and in support of his or her highest possible future. (Sharmer 2018)

Professional Development Workshops

Intergenerational Workshops

Certified Practitioner program in Transformative Learning Communities.

This is a leadership program centered on paradigm shifting relationships for social change in education. We invite you as an integral heart-centered changemaker to be our co-generators in facilitate learning communities forward into the world as an obvious choice for learning for life.