Glokala Kicks off Piloting of the SMALEI Matrix
On a cold and sunny winter’s day in Malmö, one and a half years into our work with the Sustainability Matrix, the time had come to start up the Piloting Work Package with our co-workers at Glokala. With one and a half years of researching, discussing, and sharing thoughts through collaborative writing, live meet-ups and zoom calls with our project partners around Europe and in Turkey behind us – we initiated the more hands-on part of the project: to try it out together. How might the Matrix be applied in the everyday work of an ALE institution – in this case a Swedish folk high school?
We met up with ten of our colleagues in one of our classrooms for a full day dedicated to the Matrix, half of which was aimed at introducing the work and inspiring with a new approach to the issue of sustainability, and half for hands-on analysing the current state at Glokala and brainstorm ideas for improvement. As an introduction, we posed a few – to humanity at this moment in history – very central questions.
Where are we? Even though we know that our colleagues are painfully aware of the state of the planet, we wanted to create some common ground. We talked through the Planetary Boundaries model from Stockholm Resilience Centre, giving examples from each of the areas where we have crossed the border of “Safe operating space”. Beyond this point, scientists predict that the life-sustaining capacities of the Earth are at risk. What did we find out? That it’s much worse than we thought. The droughts, the storms, the floods and the fires are already threatening millions of lives. The protecting shelf-ice is melting around the Antarctic, leaving all of the land-based ice unprotected – meaning we are heading fast towards one of the many terrifying tipping points, and sea level rise with consequences beyond what the scientists can predict. Biodiversity loss is at an all-time high. The European Commission has, based on grave warnings from the scientific community, recommended a complete hold on the fishing of herring in the Baltic Sea – but the Swedish government refuses to act on the warning.
Adding to that, as our societies fought hard to survive a global pandemic, the super rich usurped even more of our shared wealth. Oxfam writes “Since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth—nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population” (Survival of the Richest, Oxfam International).With the follow-up question, How did we get here? we traced the history of humanity back to the Paleolithic era, looking at a very zoomed-out view of some turning points that have shaped what we know today as Western Modernity.
Perhaps the most central question for humanity today is: Who are we? What do we believe about the world, and our role as people, in it? Here we introduced an alternative perspective: the Relational Approach. New science, as well as the livelihood of many of the very diverse indigenous societies, inspire us to create a New (and Ancient) Story. Turning to thinkers and scholars such as Elisabeth A. Lange, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Charles Eisenstein, to name a few, a more hopeful story appears. In Lange’s words:
“Earth is alive – a mysterious living organism. Earth is sustainable by nature, with an inherent ability to sustain life indefinitely. All we need to do as human communities is respect, honour and cooperate with these processes. Such human communities are life-giving. Transformative sustainability education is learning to live, work and be in a life-giving way.”
So – Where do we want to go from here? Envisioning another future, and defining our significant role in the transition, as educators, led us into the work with the Sustainability Matrix. Analysing and brainstorming ideas for further improvement: Our colleagues chose to look at two of the five main areas in the Matrix, namely Green skills of trainers and staff and Engagement of Learners. After analysing the current state at Glokala through self-assessment questions, ideas to improve in relevant areas of the organisations’ work were suggested. The next step will be to further develop those ideas, and select some of them that we wish to take action on or develop as concepts.
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