Commentary - Designing and Creating an Ecosocial Design Course for Popular Education

In May of 2019, I co-facilitated and co-designed an ecosocial design course entitled What Would Nature Do?  (WWND).  For my project partner, Emma Bird Ruffin, and me this represented the evolution of our experience the prior year running a Theory U-based program entitled Communities for Change, which you can read about in the appendices of this OP.  This output package details how we arrived at the decision to create WWND, how we designed it to fit our intentions, what we learned from the experience, and ideas to improve it for future use. 

As an MSc Associate in the Ecosocial Design program at Gaia University, the question of how to design interventions that address deeply rooted problems in Complex Adaptive Systems (i.e. Living Systems) is central to my studies.  What Would Nature Do? is conceived to both to teach this skill and as an intervention itself:  by disseminating this knowledge we are creating an intervention which will have a ripple effect from us through our students (i.e. our sphere of influence) and outward to their spheres of influence, whatever they may be.  The challenges presented by the complexity of the subject matter coupled with the demands for elevated personal development and high-level cognitive processes integral to Systems Thinking, demanded a sophisticated and wide-ranging set of design, teaching, and facilitation skills from the facilitation team.