Fellows Experience Together

The Ecological Belonging Innovation Fellowship track kicked off in November 2023. Around 50 fellows from across four universities (Georgetown University, Centro Universitario Facens, University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Ljubljana) embarked on a two-year fellowship journey, exploring the concept of ecological belonging and the driving question at the heart of this work: how do we live?  and how should we live?

How do we live?

So far, students have finished the first module of the fellowship, where they participated in a series of online sessions designed and facilitated by Solvable. The fellows collaborate as a cross-cultural group to explore these concepts and questions. They get to interact with other students from their own universities, as well as connecting with students from across the globe. They also began populating our global ecological discovery (pictured below) board answering questions like, “What is your felt sense of ecological belonging?” and “What behaviors and patterns create or challenge ecological belonging?” Together, they  explore the concept of ecological belonging as a collective group through personal reflection and storytelling about their own experiences, communities, and contexts.

In the first module, students participated in four sessions of collective exploration that each focused on a different facet of the ‘invisible architecture.’

• Session 1: Students reflected on the stories and narratives that shape one’s sense of ecological belonging. 

• Session 2: Students investigated how rituals and practices shape one’s sense of ecological belonging, reflected on their own communities and contexts, and how practices shape individual, community, and collective experience of an ecology or environment. 

• Session 3: Students interrogated how knowledge is molded from their environments, how community narratives and practices shape learning, and how education is molded (and is not molded) with an ecological narrative in mind. 

• Session 4: Students integrated all of their learnings from the previous sessions and recognized the importance of local/context-dependence of ecological belonging while creating haikus and designing rituals to help land the concept as a journey.

  
  Throughout these sessions, students are encouraged to lean into their sense of imagination. Together, they consider how it might look if humans reconnected, rewove, and renewed the invisible architecture and to a broader ecological narrative.

A screenshot (above) and video (below) of the global ecological discovery board where students populate their thoughts, questions, reflections, and responses as they collaborate during sessions.  

In addition to the discussion sessions, students had the chance to attend a ritual studio session hosted by Melanie Goodchild, where they learned about her connection to her indigenous community. She discussed the importance of indigenous rituals and storytelling as part of her own pathway to connecting with her sense of ecological belonging, as well as part of making sense of her positionality as an indigenous person navigating traditional Western academic structures. Students expressed their whole-filled gratitude to Melanie for sharing her story and challenging traditional western practices through their work and personal mission. 

Students in covnersation with Melanie Goodchild.