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Rooted in curiosity, care and attentiveness to diverse histories and voices, the collective offers open-ended impulses that anyone can adapt, question or extend across a growing constellation of educational hubs.
© 2025 Emerging Space Collective (CC BY‑NC 4.0)
In this talk, Daniel Schmachtenberger explores emergence as a core dynamic of the universe; an answer to how something fundamentally new arises. Emergence occurs when distinct elements come into synergistic relationship, producing properties and possibilities that none of the parts held alone. These relationships are fueled by attractive forces, whether physical (like gravity), emotional (like love), or intellectual (like curiosity), all of which support the universe’s movement toward higher-order complexity.
Evolution, then, is not random but directional; driven by increasing novelty, integration, and elegant order. Humans, uniquely capable of abstraction, can become conscious agents of evolution, not merely reacting to crisis (“emergence through emergency”) but choosing to participate in the unfolding of beauty and coherence. Each person is an irreducibly unique facet of the universe, whose self-actualization contributes to the emergence of more life-affirming systems. From this lens, building a thriving civilization means aligning social systems, infrastructures, and shared meaning with the evolutionary principle of emergence.
In the field of education, this invites us to cultivate learning environments that are not solely problem-solving mechanisms but spaces of synergy, where learners’ uniqueness meets shared inquir; sparking new forms of knowing, relating, and creating that no individual alone could generate.
Exploring Resonance & Acceleration with Hartmut Rosa
In response, he proposes the concept of resonance: a relational mode in which we are moved by the world, respond to it, and are transformed through that exchange. Resonance cannot be engineered, but it can be invited; through presence, mutual recognition, and openness to the unexpected. This leads Rosa to articulate a deeper form of vitality he calls social energy: a collective force that arises not from isolated effort, but from shared, meaningful interaction.
In learning spaces, these ideas call for a shift from optimization and output toward slowness, reciprocity, and connection. Education, then, becomes less about performance and more about cultivating resonant environments where participants co-create energy, belonging, and transformation.
Global Citizenship Otherwise Education
In this reflection, Vanessa Andreotti explores education in the context of global forces and deep structural challenges, highlighting how persistent social imaginaries shape what is considered real, desirable, and intelligible. These imaginaries often reinforce dominant narratives of progress and development, which, while appearing neutral or benevolent, can obscure complexity, marginalise other ways of knowing, and limit the capacity to imagine alternative futures. Framed by intensifying globalization, migration, cultural hybridity, and economic inequity, education today is tasked with navigating volatility, fragmentation, and rising levels of anxiety and disillusionment, particularly among younger generations.
At the heart of Andreotti’s analysis is the concept of the “yellow corn cob” as a metaphor for the normalized, singular view of development and humanity. While this view may appear harmless, it becomes problematic when treated as universal: it eclipses the validity of other experiences, perspectives, and histories. This dynamic (requiring everything outside the dominant imaginary to be repainted in its image) undermines plurality and reproduces power imbalances. In this way, education risks becoming complicit in the maintenance of a narrow worldview, especially when it promotes simplified solutions to complex problems, emphasizes individualism and mobility, or upholds savior narratives in global citizenship discourses.
Andreotti challenges the field of education to move beyond quick fixes and toward deeper existential shifts: to recognize intelligence and worth in those historically devalued, to sit with complexity without retreating into guilt or idealism, and to disinvest from the illusion of universal knowledge. Instead of projecting change onto others, learners and educators alike are invited to reconsider their own positions (relationally, historically, and ecologically).
From this perspective, education is not merely a system of transmission or adaptation but a space for reimagining how we live, relate, and learn together. It becomes a practice of holding complexity, of cultivating humility, and of generating new habits of being: ones rooted in interconnectedness, mutual responsibility, and the courage to imagine otherwise.
Zak Stein on teacherly authority
This approach is closely tied to non-coercive forms of teacherly authority: authority that is granted, not imposed, and grounded in care rather than control. However, in postmodern contexts, such authority is often viewed with suspicion, and even supportive emotional presence can be misinterpreted as a subtle power play. The challenge, then, is to cultivate relational and emotional integrity without slipping into manipulation or dominance.
Ultimately, pedagogical atmospherics ask how teacherly authority can be reimagined and distributed in ways that are legitimate, relational, and responsive to cultural complexity. In this view, education becomes not just the delivery of knowledge, but the shaping of shared space; where emotional honesty, mutual respect, and cognitive depth are held together.
Nora Bateson for the Re-Imagining Education Conference
Bateson critiques the current school model, which still mirrors factory logic and focuses on producing workers. She proposes an ecological approach instead, one that values uncertainty, creativity, and interdependence. Exercises like the Lifeboat dilemma are used to show how reductionist thinking can dehumanize and erase relational complexity. In contrast, education should support the emergence of new possibilities through mutual learning and shared presence. She describes how dominant systems often reinforce themselves in closed loops, creating what she calls a tautological trap. Institutions validate their own logics, making meaningful change difficult.
To move forward, Bateson calls for a different kind of response — one grounded in relational awareness, creativity, humor, and unpredictability. Education, from this view, becomes a living system where learning is co-created rather than delivered. The goal is not to fix isolated problems but to foster new ways of seeing, being, and learning together, beyond what current models allow.
Elizabeth Tunstall: Respectful Design
To undo this legacy, Tunstall offers six actionable steps: put Indigenous demands first, acknowledge institutional racism, build genuine BIPOC partnerships, tailor calls and qualifications to community needs, hire in critical mass, and ensure lived experience guides curriculum and policy. Crucially, critique must shift from Eurocentric aesthetics to honoring students’ cultural intentions and expressive norms.
She then urges bridging design education with industry change: graduates skilled in respectful design can lead organizational transformation at moments of crisis and openness.
For education, this means cultivating learning environments where cultural integrity, accountability, and community leadership are central; preparing students not only to design responsibly but to reshape the values and structures of their professions.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Speaking from the Laboratory
Both scientific exploration as knowledge generators and artistic practice as aesthetic contingency derive their power from unexpected gestures that challenge and reshape initial expectations. A result that might seem to fail does not end the process but becomes a point of reorientation that opens new avenues and connects the future to non anticipation and to a sense of wonder.
If educators embrace this dynamic they can reconceive learning as a living experiment that invites strategic interruptions and continual development. Mistakes and surprises are seen as generative resources that fuel curiosity and support adaptive meaning making rather than bringing things to closure.
When these principles are woven into educational design learners can build resilience and creative agency by working in processes that reflect real world inquiry. In this way classrooms turn into experimental spaces of shared discovery where the ability to navigate uncertainty becomes a central skill.