Gathering

In this blog post I will share all the analysis and reflection from all of my Research Collaborators as we reflect on the learning taken from this approach, and the learning taken from the woods. This will in part respond to Learning Outcome 4 : Synthesise your findings and present a critical evaluation of your project in a coherent, context-sensitive manner.

“When we adopt a participatory approach, what we are likely to foster in our research is an environment or a space where co-researchers can express their social world, their cultural understandings, how their economic, political, environmental worlds are impacted by various factors” (Lenette, 2024).

Lenette is naming here the dimensions of our lived experience, and therefore the dimensions affected by colonisation. Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez also uses a framework of the personal and institutional to support the analysis of action in relation to ‘implementing fungal ways’ (Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023). In this post I borrow the self and the institution as dimensions to help us map the learnings arisen.

This blog then frames the final blog post : Reflection.

What can we all learn with and from the forest to develop a more embodied understanding of eco-social justice?

Working in this way felt

• It felt refreshing and most importantly, it was fun. 
• Education has always been a field of interest for me. However, I had a very traditional and conservative view on how it looks and feels.
• This experience and getting to know all our practices together allowed me to question and imagine the ways we learn (or the ways we are taught to learn). It made me feel empowered to keep reimagining the systems I got so used to.
• It also made me feel connected to home. Being intentional with my relationship with the rest of nature literally makes me feel grounded. It reminds me of the knowledge we already have in our gut, memories and past experiences.
  
• Combining practices and collaborating with each other outside the walls of the classroom really helped break the hierarchy within a classroom which challenged the student teacher dynamic. It was also a refreshing learning environment that gave space for multisensory learning that’s way beyond what books, power point presentations, and assignments can do. It felt very liberating to have space and time to have personal conversations and to listen to each other. I began to wonder why more classes aren’t made in such environments. As it was a smaller group who shared similar interests, it was easy to have important conversations while feeling safe to be vulnerable and share transparent feelings. There was a sense of belonging, inspiration to do better, and refreshing conversations that increased my exposure to newer things. I believe a really important part of a master’s is to meet similar people who have very diff rent point of views but are working with similar goals who can help each other grow through constructive collaboration and feedbacks. This was a beautiful way to interlink practices. The series of experiences that the three of us shared felt like it gave all that.
  
• Abundant
  Working with these talented students and their emergent practices – within these mystical woods – helped me connect to the concept of abundance. The woods were abundant, their energy and sense of possibility felt abundant. What is possible, what would be done. Our triangulated imaginations together opened up a deep optimism which I find more challenging to access inside UAL structures. Within the institution there are limitations, physical walls, boundaries. Restrictions and pre-written policies. We survive within the frameworks of others by reducing a sense of ourselves and what is possible. Between the three of us, and within these woods, we saw and felt abundance.

What did I learn for yourself and your practice?

• The value of collaboration between colleagues and the rest of nature. If we want to change how a system works, we can’t do it alone. There is something incredibly special in having conversations (not only verbal) with other beings with whom you share so many things in common but also have different perspectives.
• It reminded me of a quote from the book ‘Sand Talk’ (Yunkaporta, 2019) where the author recognises how his point of view is marginal but there is fertile ground at the margins.
• I believe it is in the conversations that happen between plural experiences that meaningful change occurs.
• This was something that highly influenced my practice, as I have recognised that one of my roles in eco-social justice is facilitating these complex but important conversations.
  
• The process helped me think more about my own design in action. Since my practice was very interlinked within the exploration, it really helped me think of how the forest helps, what is the role of an outdoor space to learn about ecology. What are the better ways for us to be informed. The happiness and peace that this gave me increased my motivation to create more such systems that can practically help more learners feel all that liberation that I felt. I was also able to identify and communicate what works for me and what doesn’t as I felt heard in the group. This also was a very open to experiment, open for feedback kind of a space that allowed me to practically experiment with the ideas and visions that we had. Non extractive Co-design is always a tricky sweet spot to achieve with this domain of work. This helped me to understand the importance of including personal goals and integrating agendas in a way where the experience becomes a fruitful collaboration that everyone wants increases commitment, engagement, and the probes the collective intention resulting in a health co-design.
  
• Joy
  When speaking to our new students returning to their studies in early 2025, I am hearing them talk about joy. What brings me joy? Where did it go? How do I find it? When breathing in the air of the woods. Climbing a tree. Hiding. Listening for woodpeckers and sharing lunch with good people, I feel joy. This work has brought me joy. And without joy who are we creatively? And who are we collectively? Research tells us that being alongside (or ever just seeing) natural spaces can help human’s physically and emotionally heal, and think straight (Jones, 2020). We also need to understand nature as more than our mindfulness reservoir (Evernden, 1995). So could Art school – as both a formal and informal structure – fully embrace the role in our emotional lives, as much as our practical lives?

What could UAL learn about from this approach, and from the woods?

• I think it is important to redefine concepts like “sustainability” and “social responsibility”. Big companies often simplify these concepts or reduce them to a checklist of superficial solutions. However, I believe they have the responsibility to embrace the complexity of eco-social issues to design approaches that benefit us all. To do this, it is important to open up spaces for collaboration and imagination.
• From the forest, there are infinite things we all need to learn. For example, balancing the idea of growth and degrowth. We currently live in a system that promotes exponential growth (a linear system), but the rest of nature functions in a circular one recognising when they have enough and need to give back (living in a place with seasons made this even more clear to me). We should apply this principle in education. Right now it feels like we are constantly consuming information and have little to no time to digest it or reflect on it. Silence is important.
• Also, principles of reciprocity and regenerative connections. Even though we have hierarchies of power in the institution, embracing horizontal collaboration between staff, students, cleaners, etc. gives us the chance to rethink our relationships and encounter the value in those interactions. When we break those barriers, we realise we all have something to teach and a lot to learn from everyone else.
  
• The ease, slowness, non competitiveness of the experience is something UAL needs to learn. When I look back at what me and my peers felt especially nearing submissions and deadlines, i felt deeply that learning need not be that stressful and it should not be giving anxiety in order to make people feel like they have gained knowledge through submissions or assignments that the mainstream capitalistic education unknowingly nurtures. Instead it’s supposed to make us feel like what this experience made us feel – more knowledgeable because we learnt from each other, grow together by understand different perspectives, learning from each other’s experiments, consciously looking at the environment to learn from it. All these acted as much more important learning than having to prove your learning that’s restricted to words bounded by a screen. I believe as an art and design school that markets to be socially purposes it needs to exhibit learning and assessing of that learning to be way more plural, diverse, rooted and contemporary to the needs of today’s world. This experience in the woods was consciously customised to make sure everyone felt okay and always practiced a transparent feedback loop that was converted as immediate actions which made all the difference. I hope more learners get to experience and experiment with learning that suits for them and their diverse needs.

Ways of knowing : what can the woods do to support UAL’s practices
After listening to and reading the responses from my collaborators, I independently tried to arrange our collective thinking into five learnings for UAL 

• Understand everyone in your network as knowing
  Students, teachers, cleaners, deans, neighbours. Everyone in the UAL network brings together a plurality of valuable knowledges. What if UAL valued these knowledges equally? As Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez describes in their book Mycelium Teachings, within the rhizome (root storks) of fungi, all participants are givers and receivers (Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023). As we talk about anti-racism and anti-colonial practices, we can’t overlook the knowledges present in our own roots, and soil. The knowledges that underpin an organisations growth.
• Adapt and change form. Decentralise
  Like all more-than-human systems know, we need to change form in order to remain useful. We might consider de-centralisation in terms of places and campus’s (where else could art school be), but we can also think about it in terms of power distribution. Building everyone’s capacity to create and contribute and teach. What and who are we excluding when we teach and collaborate within the formality of our UAL buildings spaces? Create space for de-growth, composting, renewal. Metamorphosis.
• Enchantment. Play.
  The origin is the word School is the Greek word for Leisure and play. So when you are at school, and you are not playing, then you are no longer at school. “Serious Playfulness” – as described in the book Artistic Ecologies (Pethick & Martinez 2022) is “essential for the transgressing hierarchies between teacher and students, hosts and guests” (Pethick & Martinez, 2022, p. 72).
• Start from within
  Our bodies are nature, they need time to digest, they need to sleep, they need nourishment. Our learning environments work against our natural rhythms. Artificial lights, temperatures and linear timekeeping. Communication can also be sensory. What does learning smell like. How does climate change affect our practice when we feel the climate on our skin?
• Vary the pace
  While we live within a linear / capitalist system that promotes exponential growth, the more-than-human world recognises rest, de-growth, self-sacrifice. When trees have enough food and water, they send nutrients underground to others. Unnoticed unconditional love. We believed through this work that we could apply this principle to education. “Right now it feels like we are constantly consuming information and have little to no time to digest it or reflect on it. Silence is important.” (Quote from research collaborator).

Data Poetry
From all our words combined above, I also experimented with some data poetry (Glesne, 1997). Selecting lines of text from our ‘dataset’, being careful to preserve the authenticity of the original voices, creating poetry that lets the emergent themes rise up. As a researcher I did not add anything new to the poem, this process was about helping me and my research collaborators see how our words and ideas interconnected and told a story collectively.

References

• Evernden, N. (1995). The social creation of nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
• Gray, C., & Malins, J. (2007). Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxon. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [14 November 2023].
• Glesne, C. (1997). That Rare Feeling: Re-presenting Research Through Poetic Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), pp.202–221. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300204.
• Jones, L. (2020). Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild. Penguin.
• Lenette (2024). PAR (Video).mp4.
• LSE Higher Education. (2024). Turn data into poetry | LSE Higher Education. [online] Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/2024/11/29/turn-data-into-poetry/ [Accessed 26 Jan. 2025].
• Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Y. (2023). Let’s Become Fungal! Valiz.
• Pethick, E., Martinez, P., and How, W. (2022). Artistic Ecologies. MIT Press.
• Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperCollins Publishers.