Part 2 of 2: Diversity EQUALS Health - Building Liberatory Learning Communities Across Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Gender

An Intentionally Unfinished Invitation to Co-Creation

January 15, 2024 honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, I share my most vulnerable blog post yet—one designed to be co-created with you through dialogue, reflection, and lived experience. This centers the most complex Triple WellBeing® competencies while remaining intentionally unfinished, responsive to your insights and evolving through our Outdoor Nature Based Programs and community partnerships.

This connects to my ongoing journey since 2016's "Pilgrimage for Hope," where I explored how regeneration requires moving beyond individual transformation toward collective liberation. As someone navigating privilege in educational spaces, I understand that creating truly integrated learning communities demands ongoing examination of how dominant cultural assumptions shape what we consider "normal" or "rigorous."

From Individual Immunity to Collective Liberation

My previous post explored how nature preschools and forest schools boost immunity through diverse microbiome exposure—an example of diversity equaling health. But health disparities along racial and economic lines reveal that individual wellness cannot be separated from systemic justice. True regenerative education requires addressing both simultaneously.

The Triple WellBeing® framework—integrating thinking, feeling, and connecting capacities with self-care, people-care, and earth-care practices—generates nine competencies that become most powerful when developed within diverse learning communities:

Awareness: self-awareness • social awareness • environmental awareness

Compassion: self-compassion • compassion for others • compassion for the more-than-human world

Action: resilience and agency • citizenship and belonging • rewilding and regeneration

Preparing for VUCA Futures Through Liberatory Education

In "The Future of Smart," Dr. Ullca Hansen (author, educational thought leader, mother, social change advocate, and former Denver School Board candidate) describes how Holistic Indigenous Liberatory (HIL) schools most effectively prepare students and families for our VUCA future—characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

Hansen explains: 

"Education is at its own leapfrog moment as we face a choice about whether or not to invest in the 'infrastructure' needed to rapidly make human-centered/liberatory education available to all communities [as opposed to only wealthy and privileged communities]... You can't ask people to have a sense of mutuality and agency and to build communities in human-centered liberatory schools if they don't have the sense of belonging, the sense of relating, or the sense of being part of something bigger than themselves."

This resonates deeply with my understanding that regenerative education must address both individual development and systemic transformation—what I call both/and thinking rather than either/or approaches.

Beyond Integration Toward Liberation

Through critical dialogue and your contributions, can we co-create "sense of mutuality and agency" by cultivating "sense of belonging, sense of relating, [and] sense of being part of something bigger than [ourselves]" to "build community [through Mycelium Cooperative] in human-centered liberatory manner"?

My vision extends beyond traditional "integration" that has historically harmed some participants through superficial "exposure" to diverse families and perspectives. Instead, following aboriginal activist Lila Watson: "If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

Research Foundation: Friendship and Economic Mobility

Recent research reveals profound connections between diverse relationships and economic mobility, supporting arguments for integrated learning communities:

• The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers - Integrated Schools Podcast examining early childhood segregation patterns

• An Overdue Reckoning in Indigenous Education - Exploring Indigenous educational sovereignty and wisdom

• The Secret to Upward Mobility: Friends - NPR coverage of groundbreaking friendship research

• How Much Are the Right Friends Worth? - Freakonomics analysis of social capital research

• Harvard Gazette: Childhood Friendships and Economic Mobility - Raj Chetty's team's big data study showing childhood interactions matter more than "who you know"

• Brookings: Seven Key Takeaways from Chetty's Research - Policy implications of friendship and mobility research

Examining Our Cultural Assumptions

The Integrated Schools resource "How We Show Up" provides crucial framework: "Our intention is to promote integration, however those of us who have been educated in and existed in predominantly White spaces bring assumptions that are steeped in Whiteness. These resources expand our awareness of how those norms impact how we show up in integrating schools, help us examine our cultural assumptions and give us a framework for becoming, with continual practice, better parents and caregivers."

This connects to my ongoing learning about using privilege responsibly in educational leadership transitions. Creating truly liberatory learning environments requires examining how dominant cultural assumptions shape what we consider "academic" or "rigorous," while centering approaches honoring diverse ways of knowing and being.

Daily Practice: Building Narrative Together

Beyond research and theory, what does this look like in daily Outdoor Nature Based Preschool practice or adult Mycelium Cooperative workshops?

One day…

Then…

Finally…

These "One day; Then; Finally" prompts from our Storytelling and Story Acting (STSA) protocol help 3-6 year olds structure original stories with beginning, middle, and end. These loose suggestions elicit creative, student-led voices that the whole class acts out on our circle stage, with student authors directing and choosing whether to perform or observe.

These prompts also connect to liberatory practices from Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, which I reference in adult workshops exploring social justice through embodied practice.

Cross-Species Communication as Model for Cross-Cultural Connection

"How Diablo Became Spirit"—the jaguar story I use with 3-6 year olds about animal communication—serves as reference point for adults about the difficulty of communicating with the "other" and the need for developing contemplative practice to be effective in social justice goals.

As Van Jones explains when talking to Pachamama Alliance board members: IF we are to have perceptual reciprocity with a history of pain, we need contemplative practice so we can "Grow our comfort zone."

Even if we understand animal communication as metaphor for empathy, body language reading, or keen observation, we benefit from taking perspectives of different "beings"—in this case, cross-class, cross-race, cross-ethnic, and cross-generational perspectives.

Expanding Sensory Bubbles: From Ed Yong to Social Justice

Ed Yong's "An Immense World" reminds us:

"The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world."

This perspective-taking leads us toward cultivating ecological identity while increasing capacity for what Mitchell Thomashow calls "perceptual reciprocity":

"What will all this eventually yield? What will happen when you find the middle ground, blending perceptions along with the shared perspectives of multiple people, generations, cultures, networks, creatures, and landscapes?"

From Reciprocity to Generosity: The Liberation Connection

As Thomashow writes in "To Know the World":

"Under the best circumstances, a truly reciprocal encounter yields generosity. Reciprocity implies exchange. Generosity implies gratitude, kindness and compassion. It encourages empathy, dialogue, connectedness and love—the giving of yourself to others."

In our first three months of programming, I witness this even in youngest mixed-age 3-6 year old cohorts. They practice deeper kindness and love transcending compliance or exchange, diving into genuine perceptual reciprocity. The care they show during escalated conflict resolution and passion for creating grasslands seed banks while reseeding impacted areas demonstrates exceptional development.

These young humans embody Triple WellBeing® approaches, combining thinking, feeling, and connecting capacities with self-care, people-care, and earth-care practices—especially developing: resilience and agency; citizenship and belonging; rewilding and regeneration.

Your Invitation to Co-Creation

I invite you to explore perceptual reciprocity and contemplative practice for communicating with the "other":

• What "other" are you living into and trying to communicate with? • What is that "other" telling you? • How would that "other" share, grieve, and act in a Council of All Beings or Theatre of the Oppressed workshop?

Please engage by:

• Adding comments referencing specific text or audio from linked resources

• Emailing us directly with reflections on specific materials

• Joining our co-creation of regenerative learning ecologies centering Holistic Indigenous Liberatory learning through multigenerational, multilingual communities supporting our youngest learners

  
  

(When commenting or emailing, PLEASE REFERENCE SPECIFIC TEXT OR AUDIO rather than simply sharing opinions on titles/topics—initial reactions without citing linked materials may be too volatile at this stage. I can engage escalated volatility once we have deeper, lasting relationships.)

Building Pay What You Can Culture

Through Mycelium Cooperative's Pay What You Can culture and partnerships with organizations like the Rock Center, we're developing economic models that honor our unfair economic system's history while creating integrated school communities going beyond harmful "exposure" models toward mutually beneficial relationships across race, ethnic, gender, and class divisions.

This represents what grows when something life-affirming emerges from systems that have perpetuated educational segregation and economic inequality. We're not just creating nature-based programs—we're experimenting with solidarity economies making transformative education universally accessible.

My blog posts serve diverse audiences—families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students, and community adults—covering the "Tangled Bank" (Darwin's enduring metaphor) of interests, initiatives, and networks weaving together when we center justice, relationships, and regeneration.

Through Outdoor Nature Based Preschools, K-8 Forest Schools, and Emergent Strategy Wildcraft Workshops for Adults, we explore perception, observation, interpretation, and reciprocity from human and more-than-human perspectives. Central to all age groups remains this understanding: Early Childhood is "not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important."

This post will evolve based on your contributions—let's co-create the narrative we can live into together.