Unitive Education Collaborative

The following information is taken from our collaborative's founding document and is shared here to amplify its mission and  draw support from fellow educators who'd like to support our initiatives.

ABOUT US

The Unitive Education Collaborative (UEC) is a newly forming group of educators, policymakers and non-profit organizations that is committed to contributing an evolutionary ecological approach to current global education systems. It’s activities are underpinned by the Unitive Narrative. The initiative seeks to support young people in acquiring the wisdom and skills they need to successfully respond to the greatest challenges of our time, to explore and promote the best of what it is to be human within an AI facilitated world, and to foster a global regenerative civilization.

THE CONTEXT

The need to shift the focus of education away from personal attainment and material gain towards human and planetary flourishing is now being discussed by leading organizations around the world. Education systems connect us to our local communities, tells us what is important to those around us, and ensure that we have the attitudes, knowledge, skills and multi-level intelligences and ethical behaviors to participate in a complex and changing world. Ultimately, they are a foundational social contract that not only supports a childhood preparation for an unknown and uncertain future, but that also sustains us throughout our lifetimes. Education is essential for flourishing, in that it contributes to the evolutionary growth process through the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and worldviews necessary to survive, and vitally to flourish, in a complex world with others. It facilitates the transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next and, when at its best, enables the compassionate deconstruction of what has gone before to serve the emergent needs of the future. At this time in human history, when we are facing climate change, a financial crisis, global destabilization and the explosion of AI, the transformation of education systems has never been more important.

RESTORING A UNITIVE NARRATIVE

While such an initiative may seem daunting, we are called to recognize that the wisdom we need to overcome these challenges still exists within our most ancient human cultures. We have come full circle, with the breakthroughs and evidence of modern science and spiritual leaders now concurring with what indigenous and other spiritually-based traditions have been teaching and practicing for thousands of years: the existence of a dynamic, natural and relational intelligence that is alive within us and around us and that expresses an essential unity within all our diversity. This natural intelligence is expressed through the ecosystem of every living species as the cycles, patterns and principles that underpin and nurture a self-organizing regenerative vitality. It is experienced through the tangible and intangible, through both its material and nonmaterial forms. As an interdependent aspect of this natural intelligence, humans have a kinship with all life that should inspire us to preserve and regenerate the ecosystems on which all species depend. 

To this end, and to commence a new beginning, a paradigm shift is needed in our ecological worldview, so that we stop seeing nature as something ‘out there’ and fundamentally separate from us, and instead recognize it as an essential aspect of our own ‘Interbeing’ that we share with all other living species Unitive Education Collaborative (UEC) and the planet itself.  Unitive Education is therefore of vital importance to support our species's transition from a worldview of separation that promotes our callous exploitation of nature to one with a holistic worldview that harmonizes humanity with nature to build a regenerative future. Young people are the architects and navigators of the coming phases, that include such transformational development on a global scale. With their potential to move us beyond the future that is currently predictable, we now need to nurture the next generation’s ability to fully honor humanity’s role as a catalytic agent for change. And this includes the balanced development of self- awareness and the prosocial moral and ethical capacities that we will need for a regenerative future. Encouraging the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual forms of emergent communication underlying such a dynamic, the initiative recognizes the unifying energy of love as the core driver of this transformational process, with universal peace and harmony as that most fundamental of educational aspirations. It is inviting the support and active participation of all those who are similarly committed to such an aspiration.

To promote this vision, we seek to empower students and teachers with the wisdom and skills

exemplified in the 7 Core Pillars below:

THE SEVEN PILLARS

1. Recognizing Kinship and Interbeing through a unitive narrative/planetary and universal consciousness that acknowledges the natural order and interconnectedness of an essentially living and evolutionary Universe

2. Embracing Emergent Systems Thinking about human beings, life, society, AI and our relationship with the natural world

3. Cultivating New Forms of Awareness that honor the importance of personal vitality/enlivenment and that recognize wonder and awe as manifesting from a deep and intimate relational connection between human beings and spirit/the land/all living species

4. Empowering Personal Agency with every young person being supported in recognising and optimizing their unique relational capacities and potential

5.  Implementing Curricular and institutional reforms that foster ecological awareness and transformative change

6.  Integrating Holistic Healing of individual/collective relational trauma to serve global reconciliation/ planetary peace

7. Promoting Prosocial Behavior that redefines the nature of success, emphasizes compassionate understanding of the other, and reaffirms that I am only well if we are well