Job Alert: New Role Openings
Dear fellow humans,
I apply with enthusiasm for the world founding role within your life, organisation and community. I realise this position has not been advertised and so, given our aspirations for the future, my application defines and describes how the role works, and what we might do differently together.
Our challenge is clear. No doubt you’ve noticed that we humans seem to be preparing ourselves for and, simultaneously producing, a future that neither we, nor most of the species on the planet, can actually endure. Of course, as you also know, lots of very clever people have been asking questions about how we could prevent that future and what we could be doing instead of preparing for it. Many people are looking for the alternative but don’t know how to get started. The world founding role invites you to ask those kinds of questions and respond to them as a way of getting started. Three specific lines of questioning, combined, offer tangible approaches to transforming our ways of being together, realising our aspirations and co-creating futures that reflect our relational, symbiotic humanity.
These are;
What if we co-created alternative futures and mandated curricula and ways of learning and knowing that would support our full participation in their democratic realisation? ,
What if we collectively reversed the ongoing colonisation and overthrow of our individual sovereignty and instead open these to the rich, complex and rewarding horizons that our collective imagination might afford us?,
What if the widespread and increasingly apparent crises within formal education systems across Australia (and more widely) were, rather than an impediment, in fact a gateway to the founding of worlds that embody our relational, symbiotic humanity? What if this gateway was as transformative for educators as it could be for students and communities?
If these questions resonate with your aspirations, our interests converge. If they spark your curiosity, feed your sense of hope, enthuse or in some other way move you, then we have common ground. Allow me to outline the nature of the role that seeks to address each of these lines of questioning.
What if we co-created alternative futures and mandated curricula and ways of learning and knowing that would support our full participation in their democratic realisation?,
Together we will need to:
actively open social horizons that embody thinking, doing, and being differently
Alternative futures begin in small, local ‘laboratories’ that we can call ‘project-worlds’. These must originate from expanded social horizons or we will simply reproduce the problems we seek to address. Our first steps together must be in opening those horizons as we formulate the projects that are calling to us for action.participate in founding and co-creating alternative ‘project-worlds’ grounded in a Symbiotic understandings of existence.
Those expanded horizons have us starting from understandings of humanity as already enmeshed in a net of relations with other beings on the planet (the Symbiocene - [Albrecht, 2019]). From here, our creating becomes essentially different to the common place mechanisms of reproduction. We can only create and gather the necessary know-how on doing this work through participation in this deeply innovative way of being. Value, identity, relations and processes are each forged in this creative work where garnering nous and phronesis (practical knowledge) are of foremost importance. Hence, co-creating symbiotic project-worlds, shapes our ways of working and ways of knowing; in short, who we are and who we become.engage in curriculum development and know-how pedagogies of release and collective re-imagining Experts and critiques within a full range of fields of human endeavour will need to work with educators on this re-founding project. We have a wealth of ways of knowing that could be curated to provide the points of reference for the incredible work that lies ahead. Equally there are pedagogical processes across cultures globally which distill the relational essences of the Symbiocene. Thus, both our ways of thinking and relating become aligned as we learn our way forward.
What if we collectively reversed the ongoing colonisation and overthrow of our individual sovereignty and instead open these to the rich, complex and rewarding horizons that our collective imagination might afford us?
Together we will need to:
openly engage in disclosing the fantasies we entertain and that populate the public discourse.This would release us from trapped thinking and foregone conclusions, making more room for genuinely innovative responses. More to the point, it would release the energy and spirit that is also trapped in those fantasies.
seek authenticating experiences of symbiotic relations as a means for furnishing our shared subjectivity and democratic imagination This will re-ground our shared meanings of human existence in organic, relational and fundamentally nurturing ways of being together. It allows us to drink from the stream of imagination, at its ontological source and begins the critical work of re-situating our thinking, doing and being in relation to and with the world.
withdraw time, finances and psychic resources from activities participating and contributing to the grand, dystopian narrative, and reinvest them in ventures that embody a rich, shared imaginative realisation of our symbiotic relations.
Stepping on from those authenticating experiences, we naturally feel our care, energy and focus falling away from the fantasies we previously entertained. It is time to reinvest in the small ventures, through dialogic processes and nurture our emerging sense of how thinking, doing and being might be embodied differently.
What if the widespread and increasingly apparent crises within formal education systems across Australia (and more widely) were, rather than an impediment, in fact a gateway to the founding of worlds that embody our relational, symbiotic humanity? What if this gateway was as transformative for educators as it could be for students and communities?
Together we will need to: (here I borrow from other experts in this field.)
“build horizontal, non-hierarchical, participatory communities of scholars and anchor practices in an ethic of care for the more than human communities in which we are all embedded” (Hil et al, 2022, p )
The bravest feature of this work is the co-investment as human beings (beyond the politics of identity, the existing order and power dynamics) into one another and our shared, perhaps only, source of hope; the collective imagination. This work, while essentially relational, promises a reorientation of social, economic and political systems towards new framings of the value of labour, relations and power. Formal institutions will need to pair with aligned business and community groups to realise aspirations, build new knowledge and enshrine ways of being together that afford each of us the the mutual benefits of that investment.
“reimagine the epistemological, cultural, and curricular frameworks of education as part of a democratic transformation of society in order to articulate a broader political and philosophical framework on the purposes and politics of education.” (De Lissovoy, et al, 2014)
There is no doubt that the ideological framings underpinning education have been wrestled into the service of the economy. By extension, we find ourselves preparing young people to participate in systems that are at once manifestly destructive to our hopes and simultaneously giving way to the more destructive forces of techno-feudalism described by Varoufakis (2023). In short, we are preparing them for a future where they cannot endure. If we are serious, we must immediately begin the collaborative co-creation of project-worlds founded in understandings of the Symbiocene and, simultaneously imagine, develop frameworks that support that critical work.
World founding has already started. If you’d like to learn more or co-invest, contact me here and let’s talk about the ways forward.
Sincerely yours,
Dr Michael Bell
De Lissovoy, N., Means, A., & Saltman, K., (2014). Toward a New Common School Movement. Routledge: NY ISBN 9781612054414
Hil, R., Lyons, K., Thompsett, F., (2022). Transforming Universities in the midst of Global Crisis, Routledge: NY ISBN 9780367897833
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism, Vintage: London ISBN 9781529926095