A Learner’s Manifesto
When we engage in learning and as adults, outside of the walls of the academy or for reasons that don’t involve credentials and ties to the potential of economic advancement, what we are doing is engaging in individual and collective healing. Anything less than that is not worth our life force or time.
We deserve to find an approach that is holistic, that addresses our cultures, spirits, communities, and lives. We need an approach that centers our wellbeing. According to this article on the future of healing, “A healing centered approach is holistic involving culture, spirituality, civic action and collective healing. . . The term healing-centered engagement expands how we think about responses to trauma and offers [a] more holistic approach to fostering well-being.”
We are agents of change in ways that restore our own wellbeing and that of our kin near and far. Wellbeing is a function of agency and learning is the ultimate agency. We will bring the four core features of agency: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. We want learning to help us grow them. This graphic from Modern Learners shows how they work in an optimal learning environment.
Liberation, freedom from oppression, and social justice demand of us an awareness of justice and inequality, a deep and thick empathy, and actions that organize, resource, and shape change. All of these are learned skills. We learn them from each other, from our ancestors, and from our history. We learn by taking risks, finding brave spaces, and by listening. The outcomes of this kind of learning are wellbeing, hopefulness, and optimism.
Freedom, justice, and love are the foundations of our thriving, our growth, and our wellbeing. We learn this from bell hooks and her beliefs about love and from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s politics of care. When we advocate for change in policies, opportunities, and systems that cause trauma we are shaping the future for ourselves and being good ancestors for the future.
Healing is political. Learning is political. (Denying this is itself political; it sides with the status quo.) Shawn Gainwrite tells us in his book on urban education that: “Healing is political because those that focus on healing in urban communities recognize how structural oppression threatens the well-being of individuals and communities, and understands well-being as a collective necessity rather than an individual choice… community organizing and acting in ways that improve communities builds a sense of control, agency, and self-determination, which are important for collective well-being.” Recognizing structural oppression as a threat to our lives and our communities places well-being as a communal need not an individual right. Community organizing, resourcing, and action are the foundations of political and individual care.
Learning is change: our brains, bodies, and worlds change when we restructure our understanding. Change can be an upheaval, a lightning strike, or a slow meticulous process of incremental understanding. When we restructure how we think, we change our attitudes, actions, and behaviors. When we learn, we stress our brains a little bit and we ask ourselves to step into the unknown. We shape the future of our brains and bodies together and we want education that acknowledges and supports this. Altruism and compassion researcher Kelly McGonigal tells us not all stress is bad - but the outcome is based on the environment and the space we create.
Change only happens in community. We need each other and a space to expand. Individual isolation and atomization is the goal of facism through capitalism. When we learn in community we build bridges across which change can flow. Philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, in her book The Banality of Evil talks about the origins of fascism in ways that would sound very familiar to us in our age.
Our brains are malleable, but we must work together to mold them. Without each other we are in danger of living in the vacuum created by a lack of empathy and the inability to be self-critical. Education, and especially critical thinking and emotional intelligence build our humanity. We want a pedagogy that fights fascism and all the isms that create our systems of injustice. Our bodies and our hearts know what is real connected learning and what is passive scrolling and reading the opinions of folks who are not at stake in the change. We want to build understanding with other people who have their hearts, lives, bodies, and communities at stake in the change. We are not fooled by the stream of information fed to us in segmented consumer blocks created to radicalize us past the ability to connect and we demand embodied learning.
What we learn matters, who we are when we are learning matters, and who we trust and listen to as we learn matters. Community matters. We are the company we keep so we keep good company as we learn. (This idea comes from the work of Dr. Douglas Brooks on the importance of community and connection.)
Finally, the institutions to which we trust our minds, hearts, bodies, time, talent, and life force need to be focused on our thriving. They need to be making decisions that shape change with us and looking at learning in new ways - changing the context when it no longer serves. Exploring the reconstruction (post-Civil War) era in the American South, Thulani Davis describes The Emancipation Circuit – the ways in which “four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom.” It is possible to create transformative, emancipatory institutions – political, educational, and personal – through mutual aid, strategy, and yes, education.
We, who love the world we inhabit, who love each other, and who love to explore with endless curiosity, demand that our learning be as expansive as our minds. We demand healing. As the writer and revolutionary thinker Octavia Butler says, We shape change. With john powell, We build bridges. And, because we know our revolution needs it, as the anarchist Emma Goldman says, we need to dance our way to change- we deserve joy.
