Decolonising our learning practices and the role of semi-permeable boundary holding

This lab note is part of a series offering a deeper dive into our co-evolving collective learning or how we learn together.

• The first note offers a summary of critical shifts in power, connection and accountability this way of collective learning cultivates.
• The second note offers a little bit more detail about “detectorism” as the foundation to our collective learning and why we learn like this.

The following notes take a look at ‘What does disruption of business as usual project learning look like in practice?’ These mini lab notes cover nine different practical strategies we use to diversify evidence and value in our collective learning. They are grouped into four bundles for ease of exploration:
↗ Values led developmental evaluation
↗ Commoning knowledge, knowledge weaving and relational ethics
↗ Diversifying data gathering to cultivate inhabitancy
Decolonising our learning practices and the role of semi-permeable boundary holding (this note)

As we continue to explore themes of scaling deep, funding, and evaluation, one pattern keeps rising to the surface: the growing shift from traditional measurement toward collective learning — not just as a buzzword, but as a real, grounded practice that redistributes power and reorients how change happens. [Tatiana Fraser — The Sanctuary]

Decolonising our learning practices

The colonial project relies upon knowledges and learning infrastructure being used to other, to separate, to divide, to undermine, to disempower, to extract, to erase and to oppress (Centric Lab). It is therefore critical to mutual flourishing that we pay particular care to name, disrupt, and reimagine these knowledges and infrastructuring practices in our collective learning.

Our commitment to decolonising our learning practices is situated within an understanding that this is an ongoing journey of paying attention to how the legacies of enslavement and colonialism continue to play out in how we learn, what we learn, who/what is part of the learning, which knowledge lineages we seek inspiration / guidance from, and ultimately why we are learning collectively. We advocate for reparations for harms inflicted by (neo)colonialism through erasure of local and Indigenous knowledges, ways of knowing and learning in community.

We have a role to play in this reparative process, including but not limited to, our commitment to unlearning in ways that disrupt and challenge colonial knowledge infrastructure legacies; and by honouring traditional, land-based and Indigenous knowledges, ways of knowing and learning practices.

The collective learning practices named in this lab note series are ultimately concerned with the relationality of all life. It is from this consciousness of entanglement and commitment to rehearsing relational and regenerative practice, that we work to decolonise our research and collective learning.

Detectorism is an open and participatory learning approach that actively weaves many ways of knowing, and takes care in honouring knowledge lineages and the communities that have stewarded them. Learning like this opens up a much more inclusive and enriched portrait of the many stories of place in Dudley and beyond. Detectorism in the Wild takes us further along this journey of unlearning by decentering power within our shared learning away from dominant white, anglo-european, academic research traditions and biases. Instead we embrace the diversity of knowledge making and ways of knowing in our team and wider ecosystem, and weave together a range of methods, disciplines, and worldviews as part of our collective learning. This intentional knowledge weaving and collective learning — including our more-than-human learning companions — seeks to make our shared insights and modes of sensing more reflective of our complexity and potential for mutual flourishing for all life. We also know there can be harms inflicted in any relational learning process, and we seek to name them and respond with care, and where possible engage in repair.

We are grateful for the inspiration and wisdom from these knowledge elders

• Centric Lab on resourcing radical knowledge infrastructures
• Sabrina Meherally’s writings on knowledge reciprocity
• Pause and Effect’s programme Reimagining Research
• Community Power and Policy Partnerships Program, “Transformative Research Toolkit” (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, November 2023), belonging.berkeley.edu
• Robin Wall Kimmerer’s seminal text Braiding Sweetgrass
• Farzana Khan and Nusrat Faizullah — Resourcing Racial Justice: The Guide

Semi-permeable boundary holding in regenerative learning infrastructuring

A related note on how we organise and co-evolve learning infrastructure in this moment. As Elinor Ostrom argued in her eight design principles for successful commoning, boundaries are needed to protect the commons from the co-option of the market or state. We welcome the evolution of this principle by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich to instead holding semi-permeable boundaries.

Holding semi-permeable boundaries in relation to our collective learning and learning infrastructures, is about cultivating reciprocal and caring learning companionships whilst resisting being subjects of, or worse, instruments of, the extractive knowledge industrial complex.

Without this attention to semi-permeable boundaries there is a real risk of co-option, or undermining of the alternative patterns and practices of learning that we are rehearsing together within these infrastructures. In relation to our boundary holding with external institutions we name the colonial legacies of harm found in many Western research processes that are amplified today by the market-led knowledge and publication system. Instead, we seek long term learning companionship that disrupts harmful, extractive and unequal processes of collaboration with their dominant hierarchies of knowledge and preferential sites of knowledge production that exclude and enclose by default.

Furthermore, we name and invite practices of generative collaboration and seek out Fertile Edges, that we know from experience are not only possible but abundant when tended. Our Spring Gathering this year was convened in order to lift up and create conditions for Fertile Edges. Lorna describes this invitation to consider Fertile Edges in her lab note:

“The concept of fertile edges, where different habitats and species meet, is one that we consider often in our work as a social lab. We might design to increase the edge, to maximise the potential of such places of encounter. Through our exhibition and gathering we invited local people to consider: ‘What are some of the fertile edges between the actions of local people shaping cultures of care, cultures of learning and cultures of creativity?’”[Lorna Prescott]

Being intentional about HOW we collaborate together to cultivate conditions for imagination and regeneration is part of the dance with semi-permeable boundaries. Paying attention to, and seeking to design for Fertile Edges, whilst also knowing when to hold boundaries has been an ongoing learning and unlearning journey for us.

This is another space where our GUIDEing principles have been integral to our navigation of where boundaries should be held owing to the presence of red flags or Counter-Principles in the potential collaboration; or where we should engage full heartedly and with generosity where the Principles are manifest in the collaborator(s) and a Fertile Edge can be tended.

As part of this attention to edges/ boundaries we repeatedly explore and test micro-experiments of learning infrastructure with Fellow Travellers to gently hold space for, ‘life-affirming’ (Immy Kaur) and kin-centric learning networks that are equitable by design, and focused upon learning companionships, practices in place, and knowledges needed for mutual flourishing for all life. For example, Growth Edges co-convened by Holly Doron; Time Rebel missions with aligned emergent practices convened by Lorna Prescott; and shared learning in Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice. These are rehearsal spaces. Unlearning spaces. These cultivate Fertile Edges that then need tending as part of our collective learning practice. Fertile Edges do not thrive without the care and attention to semi-permeable boundaries in our collective learning-doing. These collaborations and Fertile Edges can be usefully understood as part of an emergent assemblage of regenerative learning infrastructure:

“Learning infrastructure isn’t one thing — it’s many interconnected functions that support people, organizations, and ecosystems in making sense of complexity together. … forms of infrastructure that enable collective learning, emergent strategy, and deeper systems change. These forms are not static. They’re adaptive, relational, and context-dependent. They help shift evaluation away from oversight and toward inquiry, shift power away from institutions and toward ecosystems, and shift knowledge production away from extraction and toward shared meaning-making.” [Tatiana Fraser]

We are grateful for the inspiration and wisdom from these knowledge elders

• David Bollier and Silke Helfrich’s book Free, Fair and Alive — the insurgent power of the commons
• RESOLVE COLLECTIVE on Nurturing Ecologies of learning and practice
• Centric Lab on resourcing radical knowledge infrastructures
• Wisdom curated in our Fertile Edges Spring gathering booklet from Maddy Harland, Daniel Christian Wahl and Sam Rye