Royal Roads May 2024

Climate, Complexity and Relational Accountability “Unlearning” Course

Week 1: May 3-9

TO READ before the course starts

Most courses are designed to support participants to master concepts and to build skills within a particular subject area. This course is different because it is intended to support participants to expand their capacities to navigate and make responsible decisions in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous contexts, where there are no easy answers, quick fixes or possibility for universal consensus. In comparison to “mastery” courses, this “unlearning” course works more slowly, but the impact of the course on one’s resilience and capacity to build relationships can be profound. 

In practice, this means that this course is not focused on changing your mind (e.g. getting you to say the “right thing”), but on changing your capacity to relate and to self-regulate and to respond: your response-ability. And this is much more complex than mastering concepts or skills. During this course, you will feel that things may be shifting, but you likely won’t be able to identify or predict the impact of that. It may be that only weeks after the course, when you face a challenge or a crisis, that you realize how the course has enabled you to respond differently.  

In courses focused on mastery, students are required to engage with course materials that focus on descriptions and prescriptions with a view to assimilate analyses and proposed solutions. In this course you will be offered diagnostic tools and asked to engage with course materials in a diagnostic way. This means that the materials presented are not prescriptive, but provocative and the real “content” of the course are your own responses.

Your task is to allow the materials to activate the “passengers on your bus” and to observe the resulting dynamic with the tools provided. You will be encouraged to develop a language to reflect on what you are learning from observing the dynamics of your “bus” (the parts of you engaged or not with the materials). You will also be asked to approach resistance as a teacher. An example of a diagnostic exercise can be found here: Returning Lands Exercise.

In embarking on this collective journey of learning and unlearning, we commit to offering all involved unconditional regard. While we convey to course participants that we lovingly do not care about what they think (as they are processing the many responses from their bus), our focus and care lie in expanding our collective capacity to dig deeper, to relate wider, and to show up differently.

Every week, you will be offered a wayfinding short lecture (in-person session), which will be integrated with “radical tenderness exercises”, as well as invitations for things to read, to watch and to try the following week.

For this week, please respond to at least one of these invitations:

Read: Preparing for the end of the world as we know it (2020)

Watch: Overview of depth education recorded in 2022 (35 min)

Try: Forest/city walk “re-turning time” (read pages 1 to 17)

forest-walks-june-5-single-pages_compressedDownload

Week 2: May 10-16

To watch: Watch the lecture “Teaching and Learning in a World of VUCA” recorded for your group with comments. The same live lecture (without comments) can be found here, if you are interested (presented at Vancouver Community College in March 2024).

To read: Explore the website of the University of the Forest, specially the section on relational sciences and technologies and the conversation “healing the dis-ease of separation“. A lecture with Chief Ninawa Huni Kui presenting the University of the Forest can be found here, if you are interested.

To try: Read the news article “Hopeless and Broken: Why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair” and choose one of the land/body recalibrations below to practice for a week to help you observe the activity on your bus that the article may have initiated.

Land/Body recalibration exercise:Building discipline, stamina and capacity for the long haul

The practices below are basic recommendations that can help you process and move complex emotions somatically (through your body). The practices can also support you with “the four Ds”: to de-center your ego, to disarm affective landmines, to declutter your gut, heart and headspace and to disinvest in harmful patterns. The practices may feel very different each time you do them so we suggest that you commit to repeating them more than once (ideally on a daily basis through this period). You may want to stick to only one of the practices and/or try them all, and repeat at least one of them consistently.

Food:
Observe how many times you swallow things after only the first wave of flavouring. We invite you to eat your food at half the speed you normally eat it, and chew twice the amount. If you only have limited time to eat, eat just as much as you have time for. As you chew, take the time to taste each flavour and trace back all the places this food came from. As you taste, consider the life-line of the beings that make-up your dish, and all the labour involved (of the land, water, sun, fossil ancestors, human growers, packagers, stockers, drivers, finance and sales people) in getting these beings from the soil to your guts.

Sound:
Humming is an ancient technology that is used to regulate the nervous system. Every day for a week, we invite you to hum intentionally for at least 5 minutes (continuously or not). Pay attention to what vibrates in your body when you hum: you can alternate with just noticing where the humming resonates and also experimenting with directing the vibration to different body areas. Notice what changes as you repeat this exercise under different contexts (times of the day, surroundings, emotional stimulus etc.). You can also experiment with identifying which passenger on your bus is humming and which need to hum but are resistant or reluctant to do it.

Movement:
This exercise invites you to interrupt the conditioned desire to process emotions through narratives. Instead it invites you to engage your body in the movements, sounds and rhythms that can support you to hold space for the complex emotions that may have arisen in the unlearning bundle. The invitation is not to escape or get stuck in the emotion, but to be with it and allow it to move. Invitation: Every day, for a week, dance to this same song, tuning in with the movement of rain. For the duration of the song, you should go from light rain, to regular rain, to tropical rain, to thunderstorm, to hail, to snow, and finally back to a drizzle. Try different movement experiments every day (e.g. start with something simple like tapping on your legs, then move to more dramatic dance moves as you gradually develop more intimacy with the different rhythms of the rain in your body). Song options: Iansa + Timoneiro

Week 3: May 17-23

To watch: Watch the recorded video about the GTDF wireframe and then watch “The Great Simplification” (32 min) reflecting on the ways in which the choices of narrative and imagery reflect narrow- and/or wide-boundary intelligence. Remember the invitation to test the wireframe using the handout with someone close to you. You can download the pdf of the presentation here.

To read: Read the “Anti-assholism Memo“, “Notes on the SMDR Compass“, and the “Pledge of Generations“.

To try: During this week, choose activities to be performed with your non-dominant hand to help you think through your intergenerational and inter-species commitments and responsibilities. Examples of activities:

Draw a series of doodles representing narrow-boundary intelligence, wide-boundary intelligence and relational entanglement wisdom. Reflect on how intergenerational responsibilities manifest in each of the frames.

Write a very brief note to two different generations (one older, one younger). In this note, find key words that express your personal commitments to these generations. Let your non-dominant hand “find” the words for you.

Choreograph a simple dance that you can perform with movements primarily led by your non-dominant hand. Let this dance tell a story about the relationship between humans and other species and between different human generations.

Week 4: May 24-30

To read: Read the texts/exercises: “Towards Eldering“, “The Gifts of Failure” and “7 Steps Back/Forwards/Aside”

To watch: Watch the video ” Abolition as Amends to Mother” (20 min) reflecting on the ways in which the choices of narrative and visualizations reflect narrow- and/or wide-boundary intelligence and/or relational wisdom. Remember that this is a diagnostic/probiotic exercise (not description/prescription): it is not about agreeing or disagreeing with the message or about identifying or dis-identifying with the messenger, but about learning to observe choices and frames of translators who are trying to communicate difficult or unpalatable messages, and to process what comes up for you cognitively, affectively and relationally, noticing how your responses and investments have been conditioned by the economies of the house modernity built.

To try: Forest Walk “falling to pieces” pp.49-54

Beyond the course

Longer course invitation: Facing Human Wrongs (UVic)

Experiments in Higher Education:

A complexity approach to Indigenous engagement