We bring local people together to lead or contribute to collective enquiries, drawing on their practices, knowledges, skills and relationships with people and place. By linking action to collective learning we seek to cultivate conditions for redistribution of power, rehearsing regenerative relationships with place, and expanding our circles of accountability. You can read more about this in a series of Lab Notes by Jo, our Collective Learning Steward:
Collective learning is a liberatory practice that ripples through the cultural waters we swim in
For a decade now we have been exploring learning and evaluation in complexity. For eight of those years we have nurtured a playful practice of sensing and collective learning with local people called detectorism.
We made this word/way of learning up in a community cafe on Dudley High Street in 2017. We have been testing, evolving, sharing, and playing with it ever since. There have been detectorism journals with time machines, badges for visiting detectorists, detectorism scrapbooks, festival detectorism lanyards, detectorism maps, countermaps, portraits of place, lab notes, celebrations and much much more.
Most importantly, the thing about detectorism is that everyone has detectorism superpowers, so everyone is welcome and able to take part!
Detectorism is a practice of noticing with care, of zooming in and out, looking for patterns and connections, sharing your detectorism findings, and then weaving them into relationship with data from other detectorists. Socialising the data gathered with others helps us to reveal What If…? questions. These What If questions then become the next layer of collective enquiry for those that want to explore them.
Detectorism is premised upon our understanding that in transition and alternative futures work the learning, imagining and the action for change are entirely entangled and always relational.
So detectorism is not a formal research method, more a way of being curious in the world, and using the learning that emerges from that curiosity, noticing and sensing to inform experiments, weave connections and fuel our dreaming. It is so much more than a feedback loop - though it is that as well. It brings focus to tending to capabilities that support us to pay attention to the world around us in more thoughtful ways that dissolve disciplinary, organisational, project, funding stream, sensory, modality, temporal or species based boundaries.
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While dectectorism can take many forms, the core components are that:
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Like a living organism, detectorism is always evolving, and in 2020 it evolved a generative new layer: detectorism in the wild. This was an intentional rewilding, to take detectorism beyond team and project boundaries/ perspectives in order to nurture a much wider approach to learning that helps encourage a culture of curiosity, noticing, experimentation and relational learning. Through this rewilding we have seen the emergence of:
Our entire approach to evaluation is developmental not summative. Specifically it is a values based approach called Principles Focused Evaluation developed by Michael Quinn Patton.
We learn in order to improve and to inform new creative or cultural action. We learn in order to deepen our relationship with place, and each other. We are interested in paying attention to process and practice, not just the tangible action and outputs of our work. (You’ll hear us stress ”how we do, not just what we do”, an approach that is central to Principles Focused Evaluation).
We have come to understand this way of evaluating is shaped by rhythms of collective sense-making and collaborative design for cultural animation and activism for alternatives futures. The regenerative futures we seek are emergent and rooted in cultures, and as such ill suited to linear impact logic models, or prediction-orientated theories of change. Culture change is collective, uneven, messy, ambiguous, contextual and dynamic. Instead of evaluating against fixed outcomes we have to be comfortable with not knowing, with experimenting, and collectively sensing, imagining, co-creating and sensemaking our way together into those new futures. There will be expected and unexpected outcomes to observe. The outcomes are multiple and will evolve with unexpected ripples of possibilities.
