What We Learned On Sabbatical

After a year and a half, the Field Academy is emerging from its sabbatical. As individuals and as an organization, we needed rest, reflection, and a chance to explore the relationship between the work of the Field Academy and the wider political, social, and environmental context that we live in in this world, at this moment. When our sabbatical began, we were asking ourselves questions like:
  • What is the purpose of education at this moment in our country’s history? What do we want it to be? What do we need it to be?
  • How is what we've been doing on a small scale with 50+ youth relevant to the courageous movements for transformative change that we see in our world today? How can it be more so?

At this juncture, looking back and looking forward, we wanted to name some of what we’ve learned and seen through new eyes this year:
  • So, so many people and communities across this country are trying to figure out how to talk with each other across difference.  So many more than our everyday news media lead us to believe.  People working to recognize others’ humanity and find connection without compromising the truth of their own experiences. 
  • Transformative leadership and alternatives to the status quo exist within communities that have been most directly impacted by systems of injustice.  People of color, frontline communities, and particularly women of color, have been at work staving off crisis and rebuilding our world for generations.  These communities have forged other ways not out of theory or thanks to political will, but out of necessity. We must elevate, support, and follow this creativity and leadership.
  • Many communities and movements for change struggle to connect to and grow with new people. There is often a sense of disposability and performativity - the kind of toxic culture that turns people away from each other. Even our most radical change-making spaces struggle to conjure and live into the healthier ways of co-existing that we know are possible, let alone our most powerful visions for the future.  Often we have been seeing that it is the slowing down and building of real relationship that is missed.
  • Practices we are cultivating at the Field Academy are transformative: storytelling, deep listening, the practice of iteration (returning to something - a question, idea, a place - again and again), imagination and vision, network weaving and shared leadership.  These capacities are often the first to go in the face of urgency or crisis. They are the skills that many movement leaders and communities are openly seeking in this moment, struggling to find teachers and examples.
  • The significance and accountability of being part of a real a community of practice can not be overlooked. It’s easy to say we believe in change but really hard to know how to practice what we believe in real time (high stress, high urgency, time-sensitive moments).  Being a part of a community that is actively practicing new ways together and holding each other accountable with love and rigor is invaluable. Having someone to call when you’re floundering, people to tag-team difficult problems or co-facilitate meetings with, having peers across this country who have also experienced a different way of being… this is what actually makes it possible to maintain our values and integrity during struggle.
  • The problems we are facing are systemic in scope and therefore have nodes of intense intersection.  Our education and our solutions need to address both immediate, localized injustice AND connect people to a broader understanding and a global creative resistance.   The Field Academy hosts space for people to share their experiences and supports the building of analysis out of interconnection and pattern recognition.  This is necessary to explore the dynamic truth that all justice and all injustice is both local and global.
  • The climate crisis cannot be understood as separate from the intersecting histories of imperialism, colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism.  There is not one discipline, one class, one course, one story that is enough to understand how thick these threads are woven. The only way to truly grasp the depth and breadth of this crisis is to see, hear, and feel it through a multiplicity of experiences, one that engages the body, heart, spirit, and soul as deeply as it engages the mind.
  • Decentralized movements that are interconnected and actively sharing allow for complex and transformative relationship building.  This is a dramatically different approach to building change than the top-down, single leader movement model. Decentralized communities of change mimic nature in how they grow, flourish, adapt, change, die, and are reborn.  The inherent resilience in this approach to change-making cannot be underestimated for a single community or a complex network.
  • People are looking for things like the Field Academy.  How many times this year have we heard “If only there was a way for young people to learn about this in a different way…?”  Learning to apply these skills for educational design, strategic planning, teaching and facilitation in different contexts has challenged and pushed us both in so many ways.  It has also made us realize just how valuable the Field Academy is and offered a new appreciation for how hard it can be for our students and teachers to bring these skills back into their everyday lives.  We are endlessly awed by the determination, grace, and grit of Field Academy alumni and faculty.  And ever more so after this year.

There is so much more we could detail here.  We learned new skills for serving as allies to youth leadership and new models for teaching about carbon and capitalism.  We pushed ourselves to experiment with new styles of teaching, facilitation, and coaching. We worked in deeply intergenerational communities and learned our periodic references to Kanye West and Taylor Swift are less relevant for many of our older allies and partners.  ;)

Perhaps the most important thing we’re realizing as we look towards the future, is that if we  - Heather and Jen - learned all of this and more from the past year of challenge and experience… this learning community has experienced and learned at least 25x as much.  Even writing this now, we feel goosebumps at the possible implications of learning this deep, this broad, and this intersectional. When we envision what it takes to create the healthy and just world we believe in, this is the kind of capacity we know it takes - people from Birmingham to northern Wisconsin each engaged as deeply as possible in the work of healing our world.  Teachers, students, community tax preparers, artists, organizational leaders, start-up founders, activists, health care professionals from completely different walks of life co-imagining and co-building other ways. This is what we know the Field Academy can offer this country right now.

So, our first step out of sabbatical is to bring that wisdom together in the same room, held and guided by these same questions. Catalyzed by our partnership with YES!, we’re excited to offer a Field Academy Community Jam to hold space for our wider community and these questions.  

We also want to encourage you to send in reflections on what you've learned from this past year.  We'll add it to this list! Drop us a line and share your reflections here.

With love,
Jen & Heather