Day Three - Practicing: Immersion Learning, Apprenticing
Welcome and Check-in
To the sound of music offered by Naomi Takagi, the welcome and check-in offered opportunities to reflect on the previous day. What had we learnt yesterday?
It was about a different approach to old and new problems observed, but also the anticipation of new perspectives and avenues towards transformations towards the better.
Having heard everybody's voice in the open circle gave a good grounding for the day.
Learning journeys: embarking with questions
Ngaio explained that teams or individuals going off on learning journeys had all the freedom they needed, staying on campus or moving about town as their objectives required and reporting back in the afternoon or continuing at their pace and debriefing the group on Thursday morning.
All travellers were invited to take their question about where best to invest their energy ('lever') with them:
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What can we learn about these 'levers'?
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Are there elements that inspire you?
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What surprises, scares, inspires and teaches you during your journey?
One group went with Beau Dick to the Anthropology Museum and Beau's art studio to shoot a video about passionate people.
The video was to center on the connectedness between humans across the world and their embeddedness and being part of nature.
Showing some of the traditions of First Nations in Canada and how close they are to the many other migrants making a home in the country was to become the pivotal part of the script. Equally essential was to be how to strive for peaceful coexistence between the human population and the ocean and the natural environment on the land to ensure livable futures for the coming generations.
Another group went off to downtown East Vancouver in search of passionate people there. The group wanted to explore what happened in the poorer parts of town in relation to the ocean and life in British Columbia and beyond and what they might work on to live decently today and in years to come.
A third group visited museums, including the Science World in preparation of an interactive ocean exhibition. Meeting the professionals in these establishments was a great opportunity to confront the initial concept with the experience of curators, communication specialists and other practitioners on how to connect the general public to the arts and sciences.
Individual journeys entailed e.g. writing a concept paper and teaming up with musicians of another roundtable taking place in parallel.
So, all participants went off on their individual or collective learning journeys for the day, deciding to meet again only the following morning for debriefing, thus throwing themselves into the "adventure", senses wide open, but without forgetting each and everybody's professional and personal "baggage".