Schumacher College is delighted to announce a new educational programme that brings together creative culture and ecological thinking to connect students to participate in the co-creation of critical and creative future pathways, moving towards the next transition.

Schumacher Foundation Course is a six-month low residency programme that recognises the importance of promoting and connecting resilient learning communities in response to distinct ecological challenges, through adaptive and holistic learning. Education is still finding its place within a conventional academic system, where the depth and breadth of co-creative learning is still widely challenged within formal curricular design. Steering new and regenerative education practices in an increasingly complex terrain requires new skills, responding to challenges in human health, navigating new intellectual adaptations within AI, and hospicing some of our old systems with care and compassion, as we transition towards new kinships, social structures and learning networks.

This is a unique interdisciplinary programme that celebrates an embedded and entangled learning eco-system, where economics intertwines with poetry, ecological designs are woven with listening, walking redraws topographies, and philosophy learns and translates the songs of birds. We entangle disciplines because, if what we are going through is a ‘polycrisis’, our response must be polyvocal: we must listen to, speak with and cherish many voices, rediscover the art of creative attention, move away from monologues and share in polyphonies. If ecocide is looming, it cannot merely be countered, it must be outfoxed. It calls forth creative responses and responsibilities across fields of knowledge, ways of seeing, kinds of making, forms of planting and modes of being. 

This is the first educational programme of its kind that actively seeks out new modalities of co-learning around social and ecological justice, by multiplying and unifying our lenses of reflection and action, drawing on literary and oral culture, embodied activism, ecological design interventions and innovations, and regenerative approaches to economics, in service of thriving futures for individuals, societies, and the planet.

For enquiries, or to add your name to the list for future updates, please email admissions@dartington.org.

Image credit: Grace Gelder, MA Arts and Place