Ecological Facilitation: A gritty and creative approach to leadership

Photo: Steve Marshall

April 6-10, 2010

One-week course

Jenny Mackewn and Toni Spencer

This course is open for bookings.

Already booked on the course? Click here for course resources

Course Overview

This practical and evocative course will explore questions of how to facilitate groups engaged in the challenges of creating a sustainable future. What forms and processes reflect our values and intentions? What practices reflect and therefore enable a more ecological way of being? What approaches to leadership support and model the change we seek to facilitate? These questions are applicable within community, workplace and educational settings.

Together we will create a vibrant learning community where novices and highly experienced facilitators will learn from each other, providing ample opportunity for you to practice, hone and explore your skills and qualities as an ecological facilitator. You will leave resourced and ready to make a difference.

Course Detail

Drawing from the fields of complexity theory, deep ecology, and participative democracy, we will start with the assumption that our current ecological and social crisis stems from deeply embedded cultural norms and habits, and so we need leadership and facilitation that is courageous in catalysing change: individual and collective. In practice, even the best set of tools are nothing without a facilitator who is clear and creative with their craft, and who is able to be fully present to what is there in the moment.

Key themes to be explored are: working with uncertainty, relational practice, the unfolding of the sensuous field, and facilitation as leadership.

The programme will be practical, challenging and fun. Working with the real-life professional issues of participants, we will hold a co-operative inquiry into the practice of ecological facilitation. Areas covered will include:

Photo: Michael Beaton

The course will include small group work, talks, role plays, and peer and faculty mentoring sessions. We will work with our ‘many ways of knowing’ and engage our intellectual, somatic, emotional and indigenous intelligences.

The course will include some online engagement and reading before the start date and the opportunity to continue learning afterwards.

The course is intended for: Facilitators, educators, organisational consultants, community leaders, change agents, activists, all those working with change within organisations and all those working with groups engaged with questions of sustainability. We welcome those with little experience alongside highly experienced practitioners wishing to refresh and advance their work.

What is eco-facilitation?

Our contributors tell us in their own words….

Jenny Mackewn: Ecological facilitation takes facilitator leaders beyond the individualistic and organisation-centred concerns which have come to dominate the 20 and 21 centuries, to attend to the wider and fundamental socio-ecological and cultural concerns which are now urgent.

Toni Spencer: The emerging field of ‘ecological facilitation’ looks to healthy, dynamic ecosystems for guidance in approaching change. It provides a logical and instinctive starting point for new leadership. In this work, we engage with participatory approaches that allow for the emergent wisdom of a group, and invite an interest in the cycles of life and death, of waxing and waning. We also engage with an ecological self as leader, bringing new experience and new insight to the process of change. This is wonderfully creative and deeply challenging work.

Contributors

Jenny Mackewn is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP) where she was director of a unique programme in facilitation as a form of action research. She has written a recent chapter in the Sage handbook of action research on facilitation and leadership as forms of action inquiry , and is a national trainer for the Transition Towns and Cities movement. She is currently co-creating a programme about developing resilience in organisations. She regularly leads, facilitates and catalyses sustainable change in corporate, community and academic settings.

Photo by Mel Risebrow

Toni Spencer has been leading on the innovative Schumacher Certificate in Education For Sustainability, designing, facilitating and teaching on the course using a wide variety of facilitation techniques and approaches. Alongside this she is a freelance facilitator elsewhere including Embercombe and Transition Town Totnes. She is also engaged in a re-emerging art practice and a growing practice as a wild food forager and teacher.

She holds a BA in Fine Art and a MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice. Previous professional work has been with organisations including Goldsmiths, Forum For the Future, Social Venture Network, Attainable Utopias, Wallpaper* Magazine and Wink Media.

Toni’s facilitation and coaching practice is fed by professional experience and personal interest in fields of Art and Eco Design, embodiment practices, The Work That Reconnects, Deep Ecology, participative democracy, ecopsycology, Permaculture and new social ventures.

Course Fees

One week: £700

All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.

For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College

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To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk

We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.

Schumacher College is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and as a charity (company no. 1485560, charity no. 279756). Registered office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK.