Learning to Reorganize

Regenerative Networks and the Systemic Redesign of Higher Education

Abstract

Contemporary higher education has come to embody what Zak Stein has called the "metacrisis" in its reproduction of the very logics it claims to challenge: transactional, credential-driven, extraction-oriented, and structurally resistant to the relational onto-epistemologies that sustainability demands. From a systems science perspective, this represents a recursive failure of institutional autopoiesis. The educational system reproduces its own operational boundaries precisely by excluding the feedback loops and relational dynamics that might transform it. This talk draws on the development of regenerative learning networks both within and at the margins of existing higher education structures, framing institutional disruption as a systemic design problem and sustainability education as a complex adaptive challenge.

Authentically regenerative education requires an institutional imagination rooted in co-worlding (mitwelten) and being-of-the-world (être du monde): relational ontologies that position the learner as constituted through relation rather than pretending to stand apart from a system to be studied. In systems terms, this is a shift from first-order to second-order approaches, moving from observing systems to designing conditions in which systems can observe and reorganise themselves. Place-based, distributed, and relationally constituted learning environments are better understood through this lens as alternative organisational frameworks rather than institutional alternatives that treat the network as both the medium and the message of regenerative pedagogy.

The methodology is generative and applied. Drawing on systems thinking, network praxis, and regenerative design, this work involves prototyping alternative credentialing and learning models, partnering with programmes grounded in place-based and relational knowledge traditions, and connecting learning centres across continents through a distributed coordination architecture. The Regenerative Learning Network (RLN), a consultancy and design lab operating at the margins of accredited higher education, serves as the primary case and testbed. Its development foregrounds entropy as a design condition in itself: uncertainty about accreditation, political will and public trust, financial viability, and the capacity of distributed networks to hold accountability and care are treated as generative constraints. In this framework, relationality and emergence are seen as the foundations of institutional design.

The emerging findings are instructive for systems practitioners. Coordination under disruption requires the capacity to think ecologically about institutional forms and to hold networks as simultaneously organisational structure and pedagogical practice. The symposium's core tensions of urgency, care, inclusion, and credibility are irreducibly relational and cannot be resolved at the level of individual institutions or curricula. Systems science provides both the analytical vocabulary and the design orientation to take that work seriously. The hardest work is redesigning the conditions under which regenerative learning can actually occur, and this talk offers a practitioner's account of what that redesign looks like from inside the process.