Regenerative education rejects the old ways of assessing students as individuals, considering skills as ends, and allowing projects to languish on the Google drive. Instead, it invites us to listen deeply to the voices in our community (human and other-than-human) who have engaged with and been affected by each project. Regenerative education calls for new ways to measure the quality of learning&doing.
(Learning&doing is a neologism that signals how learning is inextricable from doing. It’s not learning through doing or by doing… it’s the two as one.)
Regenerative education moves from student-centric to life-centric. Students engage in learning&doing in reciprocity and participation with others. Knowledge and skills remain essential, but they are not endpoints. They are applied to co-create thriving communities.
Let’s call what has been around for 150 years mechanistic education. It treats knowledge and skills as discreet entities. There is little connection to how their application affects others. Just look at most marking rubrics! Why do aesthetics, citations, voice, and eye contact matter, really? All that matters is the extent to which you move your audience. Do you need a rubric to assess MLK’s “I have a dream” speech?
Mechanistic education individualizes, atomizes, and contains students. Student work represented as a letter or a number, fossilized in documentation and permanent records, rather than understood as possibilities for the future.
This is what happens when we grade standards, mark PEEL paragraphs, score math worksheets, or comment on essays on the causes of WWI. This is what happens when we assign points for citations, review process journals, or assess lab notebooks. All this neatly inputted on a transcript.
Where are the stories of what matters, how we apply what we learn to co-create thriving communities?
Regenerative education doesn’t use rubrics that hunt for the number of sources or citations, judge how creative your solution is, or note you completed your process journal on time. These are important, sure, but they should always be means to something greater.
Regenerative education evaluates the quality of your participation (work) by how effectively it contributes to thriving communities. It listening to the voices of all community members, human and other-than human: What do people share? How do the trees respond? What might the worms think and feel?
Example: You’re designing a birdhouse to encourage starlings to return to a local area. The quality of your learning&doing might be determined by:
🥥 The number of starlings that successfully return and establish residency
🥥 The ecological integrity of your materials (whether they safely compost and return nutrients to the environment over time)
🥥 The birdhouse’s ability to attract and support additional species, enhancing overall biodiversity and ecosystem health
🥥 The degree of harmony and balance established among starlings and other local species.
🥥 The way morning birdsong shifts and creates beauty around us
🥥 How humans in the local community respond and value the changes
🥥 The project’s longevity and ease of maintenance
🥥 How the project helps the community develop deeper ecological awareness and regenerative practices
🥥 The change in soil vitality beneath the tree where the birdhouse hangs
🥥 The subtle adaptations of local plant life responding to new patterns of habitation
The list can go on and on… our sense-making remains open and adaptive.
Knowledge and skills are essential! but they serve the greater purpose of life. Let’s move beyond assessment:
❌ No more projects that sit on the Google Drive.
❌ No more individualizing students by assessing discrete skills, separate from how they ripples through the world
❌ No more regurgitating facts solely to pass exams
❌ No more valuing the process journal over the actual contribution
Regenerative education asks students to be participants in the process of life, to be members of the bio-collective, to grow so that others may thrive.
Anything that keeps students individualized, assesses knowledge and skills as ends (rather than means), and fails to add a layer of life-centered values is not regenerative, no matter what the title in front of the course says.
Regenerative education says: It’s not about you!
It’s about you and me and all of us, participating together to co-create thriving communities. That is why we learn&do.
Coconut Thinking 