Co-Creating Community

Hope For The Future

A talk for the second Artist-Teacher Conference hosted by Dr Abbie Cairns and NSEAD on 23rd March 2024.

Hello and thank you for inviting me to talk with you today. I felt the buzz from afar around the first Artist-Teacher conference and I was delighted to be asked back this year. I’m going to talk with you about the role I’ve created for myself and the joyful companions I get to work with along the way.

The word ‘community’ has always hit me in the feels. It probably comes from growing up in a close-knit community - the coalfield villages of Yorkshire - during a time when it felt like it was us against the world. I experienced the joy of that but also the drawbacks. It was very hard to be different and even today, fifty years on, we are only just welcoming newcomers into the Dearne Valley. I went on to experience community work in many different ways, finally coming to teaching at the turn of the century. I spent nearly twenty years at Northern College in Barnsley which was an adult and community learning centre, with satellites in former industrial communities across the region. I trained adult and community tutors on a social purpose education programme before taking the leap into freelance work seven years ago.

What pushed me into that terrifying move was a deep conviction that we need to work beyond the boundaries of our organisations; to create pan-organisational communities doing long-term, sustainable social purpose work. Even in large organisations, ideas just circulate around and we are tied into visible and invisible hierarchies, caught up in thought pools and this keeps us anchored into the short-term cycles of the work: quality cycles, inspection cycles, academic year cycles, qualification cycles.

These worked, for a long time, and it became difficult to notice that we were building up piles of debris - outdated processes that were still sticking around, layer upon layer of bureaucracy. As the world outside became wilder, FE became tighter and more controlled. In my PhD, which was about community education, I began to notice how invisible structures divided us from one another. Out in communities, why should funding streams divide us? Why does the adult learning centre do ‘education’, and the youth project next door not, when we are both teaching the same thing, only separated by the monitoring requirements of different funding streams? On the Northern College programme, we were all educators. I began to ask, how can we surface what Foucault called the ‘monuments and documents’ which keep the status quo in place? How can we make the invisible, visible?

A few years earlier, I’d started using a Facebook Group to maintain a community of social purpose teachers during and post-qualification. It was 2009 and there was no Teams or Slack. This innovation had a huge impact on engagement, retention and achievement, but it was viewed with suspicion within the organisation and when I spoke about it in professional learning settings people would literally accuse me of being ‘unprofessional’ and leave the room. I persisted, because it was working, why wouldn’t I? And I noticed that what was happening around me was the growth of the VLE discussion board, an attempt to control and reduce perceived risk from student-teacher communities. Of course, student-teachers just created their own Facebook Groups without the teacher present. With no tagging, no emojis, no photos or gifs, no easy user interface, why wouldn’t they?

So even as FE was closing down on social media communities, with the help of expensive EdTech, I was finding people who were breaking boundaries. At a Ragged University lecture by Peter Shukie in 2013, in a pub in Manchester, I discovered the concept of a rhizomatic community, based on the botanical metaphor of bluebells. That’s English bluebells, someone bossily informed me once, not the Spanish ‘invader’. Bluebells and other rhizomes are notoriously difficult to control - some of them are the invasive weeds that rightly vex gardeners and biodiversity specialists, Japanese Knotweed springs to mind. You might plant some bluebells, or you might not, they might die back in your garden or come up under the neighbours fence, carrying their rhizomatic tendrils underground. 

I loved this, as you might imagine. Not closed ‘teams’ but constellations of people tapping into their own power to communicate, curate, share ideas and intelligence beyond the boundaries of their organisation. Through Shukie’s lecture I got involved in #Rhizo14, a four-week, international ‘COOC’ - community open online course. MOOCs were just gaining popularity - designed by the tech giants of course - but #Rhizo14 was one guy, Canadian Dave Cormier, setting a provocative question at the start of each week and inviting people to respond across a range of social media platforms, connected by the hashtag #Rhizo14. It was exhilarating! Of course people did what people do - there was a schism between those who had read the rhizomatic literature (not me) and those who hadn’t (me). It seems bizarre, but look at where we’re at ten years later with all the binary shouting on socials. People gonna people! But I have to say at this point that in 15 years I have never been trolled and I have rarely seen any unkind behaviour in the communities I’ve co-created.

Our teacher education community became more ‘rhizomatic’. As the marketing department ground their teeth, we rebranded ourselves #TeachNorthern and the hashtag began to connect people across socials, people in some cases who had never been to Northern College but were attracted to the social purpose education approach.

All that stopped when Northern College and I agreed to part ways in 2016 and that taught me the wisdom of never anchoring a rhizomatic community to an organisation. #TeachNorthern continued for a while, but I couldn’t be part of it. Another hashtag emerged and stuck around for a time: #WeAreBluebells.

I licked my wounds and learned my lessons. By this time, I’d started my PhD (which also had to be disentangled from Northern College) and I was finally reading that literature around rhizomes. Lots of research had come out of #Rhizo14 too and I’d begun to learn about territorialisation (or colonisation). The way in which those structures and hierarchies reclaim the rhizomatic spaces, tidying them up into institutionally controlled ‘professional’ platforms which were described as ‘accountable’.

Hmmm. Accountable to whom? We’ll come back to that word.

Meanwhile those of us in the rhizomatic spaces who don’t want to be controlled - nomads - pick up our things and move on. Some stay behind, new people join us on the journey. And that’s healthy, it’s not a bad thing, because people gonna people - ‘settling’ in a space means even we - over time - draw those unrhizomatic walls in around ourselves and suddenly we’re not a constellation any more, but a closed group. 

Enter the Dancing Princesses. This was a trilogy of books determined to remove the ‘Cinderella’ metaphor from FE once and for all and replace it with the rebellious story of the princesses who sneaked out each night and danced their shoes to ribbons. With my colleague Jane Weatherby, I began to write about creating ‘spaces to dance’, to find the creative wriggle room in a sector which was becoming increasingly controlled. It hit a nerve and educators began identifying themselves as Dancing Princesses. A new hashtag community was formed. The Dancing Princesses became a movement for a time, with new research, events and professional relationships formed, notably a close connection between HE and FE researchers which more or less resisted power imbalances.

I was freelance by this time and working on the Education and Training Foundation’s Advanced Practitioners Programme. I’d learned enough to push for a hashtag early on, because despite good intentions people who said goodbye with enthusiastic promises to stay in touch after each training session rarely did, once they were back to the urgencies of the day job. #APConnect carried the emoji of a shooting star, as #Dancing Princesses had adopted the dancing lady emoji, to represent a constellation of practitioners. The philosopher of hope, Rebecca Solnit, writes that, 

The stars we are given. The constellations we make.

My colleagues Joss Kang, Punam Khosla and I set out to create what we were now calling a pan-organisational, pro-social community of practice. We were still constrained by the contract we’d agreed to - teach them this, they do that (and write it up in a report at the end) but we subverted where we could. The community moved away from the discussion board we’d inherited into a Slack space, where they could hop onto a chat or a Zoom and the external carapace continued across social media, connected by the hashtag. APConnect finished in 2022 after a good four-year run, it was the right moment and the work continues in and across organisations. Kirklees College’s ThinkFest, Chesterfield College’s Big Hive are online professional learning events and also networks - and there are many more. They still use the hashtag #APConnect. The Education and Training Foundation’s approach to networks faltered, as there was no effective virtual architecture to keep things going in between events.

#APConnect brought another joyful character into our lives. We noticed that the ‘final reports’, written quite naturally in ‘FE Speak’, were drained of colour. The many beautiful practice artefacts created during the year were left on the cutting room floor, scattered across the community spaces but never curated. I’d encountered the Blue Satin Bowerbird during my own research, and used him as an analysis companion to curate the blue shiny things in the material I’d collected. In his natural habitat in southern Australia, the Bowerbird creates this gorgeous bower each mating season, not to live in but to attract a mate. He decorates it with his own blue shiny things collection; blue straws and bottle tops, even a condom wrapper - the detritus of human life. The female comes along, chooses a bower and the other bowers get kicked over, the blue shiny things scattered to be repurposed  next time. I found it a compelling metaphor and even more so when I learned that while the younger females choose the best bower, the older birds go for the best dancer! A metaphor for a life well-lived, right there.

We encouraged the APs to collect up the blue shiny artefacts of their own practice and curate them into blogs, podcasts, images, tweets and articles, instead of the conventional report. This way, they were shared immediately across the broader community architecture, for inspiration, ideas and learning. ETF were happy, because they could also be packaged up and put on a website. But the energy stayed in them, as they were rediscovered by others. 

All these companions - bluebells, shooting stars, dancing princesses, bowerbirds - share a philosophical genealogy. Directly and indirectly, filtered through the ideas of 20th century thinkers, they come from the work of Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, writing in the Netherlands 400 years ago. His major work, Ethics, had to be smuggled out of The Hague when he died because it flew right in the face of the thinking of the time. Unlike the Enlightenment guys whose thinking came to dominate human consciousness, he did not separate out nature and culture, body and soul. He believed that god - however we define that - was in all of us and not just dancing princesses, but bluebells, stars and bowerbirds too. We share a lifeforce and that lifeforce he called ‘zoe’. Through reciprocal exchanges of zoe, we generate joy - a desire to live, and live well.

As you’ll gather from the title of his magnum opus, Spinoza was concerned with ethics, the human expression of values. He was also writing in Latin, which gave him two separate concepts when he wrote - inevitably - about power. Potestas is power as usual, power as we know it. Hierarchy, structure, clout, power-over, often connected to the individual. Later thinkers came to conceptualise this as the tree, standing strong and solitary (though, as well explore later, we know enough about trees to trouble this metaphor now). Potentia, though, was the concept I took from Spinoza’s work, a different kind of power. Collective, rhizomatic, joyful, activist, changemaking power. Power-with. Bluebells. 

In 400 years of virtual suppression of Spinoza’s work (glossing over the many times he was pounced on and discarded, because he’s impossible to fit into political ideologies) we lost that word, potentia, that concept, and the hope that there was any other kind of power than that laid down by hierarchy and capitalism. In FE, we became infantilised by being told what to do all the time (from the government down). I told you I’d return to that work, accountability. It’s used in FE - and in all public service - as a synonym for compliance. Another lost meaning because when things really work, they work because everyone concerned takes personal accountability. Discovering potentia gives us a chance to recognise a different power within us.

The Advanced Practitioners - and others since - have seized the opportunity to step into their own potentia. They may not be part of the senior leadership team, but in many ways that gives them more of that wriggle room, more of a space to dance. Yes, they are dancing princesses, but we can’t keep hold of these metaphors once they’ve had their day. With the discovery of another bit of theory, Advanced Practitioners and others began to see themselves as Golden Unicorns.

Yes, it’s an actual business term. Golden Unicorns are those people in organisations who know the history and culture of the place, who can read the relationships, who know how the photocopier works. They are full of potentia but so often it’s locked away because they are fed up of being unappreciated, overlooked, their ideas ignored. We worry in meetings that they will be dominated by the loudest voices, whilst not noticing that others have withdrawn their voice as the only expression of power they think they have. Enlivened, they are changemakers. Imagine the locked up potentia in our organisations. Imagine, on a bigger scale, what our societies could look like, had the concept of potentia not been locked up in Latin for 400 years!

But we are where we are. Golden Unicorns are waking up and they are working rhizomatically in hashtag communities scattered like constellations across FE. At the start of lockdown, I co-founded what was at that time the ultimate expression of rhizomatic work - #JoyFE. It’s literally our 4th birthday today and you can find our celebrations in images, words and song - across social media by following the hashtag. JoyFE has no constitution (except to be joyful), no central organising committee, no membership, money or bank account. Anyone who touches JoyFE, even peripherally, is part of it if they want to be. ‘Everyone is invited’, as our JoyFE colleague Sammy White always says. You’ll be hearing from the extraordinary Flower Fairy Tracy Boysen later. Tracy is one of a shifting community of active volunteers. We ebb and we flow and we fly in the V-formation of geese, always somebody leading an initiative with their own potentia, but never the same person at the tip of the V. When one of us gets tired - as I did recently - others fly beside them until they pick up again. It is a glorious expression of potentia. Our hashtag is always accompanied by a yellow heart.

Why does any of this matter? Why is it important to keep on the move, to resist being colonised (even as we comply with what we have to, within our organisations?) You are artists, you will know that. Your own potentia is a freedom of expression that flows into your art, and we all know that art changes things.

We live in a chaotic, terrifying and ever-changing world. The pace of change has picked up exponentially over the past decades. Crisis is always with us. Leadership research tells us we have to be prepared, to be adaptable. We are suddenly finding that those unseen structures and hierarchies are preventing us from doing the long-term thinking we need to do, about the major issues of our day - climate justice, AI, mental health and wellbeing. Our short-term sticking plasters are bursting apart. The time has come to be more nomadic, in our thinking and our practice. The time has come to co-operate, to co-create, to work collaboratively and anti-competitively. Pro-socially and pan-organisationally.

My most recent work is a devolution project in Warwickshire and the West Midlands. What, on paper, was a green skills bootcamp for teachers has become #GreenChangemakers (our emoji is a seedling, or sometimes a green heart). The training programme was not facts and figures about global burning or the loss of biodiversity. Facts and figures are available everywhere, if we have the information literacy to curate them. Emboldened by AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills, which moves way beyond the technical skills of heat pumps and wind turbines, which include much about community, about leadership and about gathering intersectional networks of golden unicorns, an ‘Adventure Ready Squad’, we brought the cast of characters together. We taught bluebells, constellations, dancing princesses, bowerbirds and golden unicorns. We taught people to recognise and use potestas, and dig into their own potentia, in community with others. We taught all of these in the first few days of the programme and the rest of the time, unfettered by the need to write a summative report, Green Changemakers went out and brought about change. It could be a paradigm shift, we don’t know that yet, but we do know that mindsets and practice are shifting. We can see potestas running to catch up, putting structures and committees in place, but when we can’t change this, we nip under the neighbours fence and do something else. 

Last Monday, we ran a conference for nearly 100 people which was so joyful and practical that you could almost taste the potentia. We did this in three weeks, 20+ people via a WhatsApp group and a shared googledoc. No meetings - they would have been impossible in the timeframe and they would have slowed us down. It was glorious - provocations, workshops, poetry, pop-up recycled jewellery making, a spontaneous Thinking Environment. And radical rest cards, spaces to pause and think and walk outside. Because we can’t be potentia all of the time. We need to be potestas some of the time - a good, social purpose career demands both. And we have to rest, because potentia, energising as it is, will burn us out if we don’t, as every activist knows.

The Green Changemaking approach is spilling out of organisations, regional boundaries, sectors and structures. It is genuinely rhizomatic and writing it all down for you today has been an affective experience. To find expression as part of a climate justice movement also brings us right back to the beginning, to those bluebells escaping under the fence.

What I know now, that I didn’t know fifteen years ago, is that nature knew this all along. Trees talk to one another. Fungi and lichen carry messages - more water needed here, a pest outbreak that needs dealing with there. The social networks of the forest have been mapped and found to be a community. Or rather, many constellations of community. Not strictly all rhizomes, but a mycorrhizal network. I’ll leave you with this quote from Peter Wohlleben, author of ‘The Hidden Life of Trees.’

“We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbours, affecting gene regulation, defence chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system.”

Why wouldn’t we want to learn from nature and do the same?