Twinning Regenerative Educators: Regenerative Education and Adventures for Students (Iceland) & ReScope (Zambia)

ReSCOPE is an educational initiative based in Zambia that aims to reconnect school communities to nature, culture and their history for abundance and resilience. Regenerative Education & Adventures for Students is a youth organisation located in the south of Iceland, with the mission to inspire and empower young people to learn about regenerative practices and lifestyles.

Both projects are working with school communities and youth to enable hands-on experiences in nature and to facilitate immersive learning spaces where students can learn to understand, explore and experience the natural ecosystems around them, instead of just learning from textbooks.

Throughout their Twinship, they explored similarities and differences in their work experiences in Iceland and Zambia. Margarita from Iceland and Mugove from Zambia both found it striking that one of their main educational challenges and aims is to question and offer a new perspective on “What is wealth?” to their students. For Margarita in Iceland, instead of growing their own food – going to the supermarket is often more convenient for the students she works with. On the other hand, the negative mindsets, water crisis and poverty in Zambia, paired with an idolization of European or American lifestyles often make it challenging to offer educational opportunities that support students to connect to nature and to their local cultural history and place. Even though their daily-life work environments of course differ strongly, Margarita’s and Mugove’s projects both in their own unique way offer new experiences and perspectives for children and youth, to question and reevaluate “What is progress and what is a good life that we are striving for?”. Through being immersed in nature, learning to design, plan and build gardens themselves, understand patterns in the ecosystem they are embedded in, children learn that they can make a difference in the world.

Margarita and Mugove both shared that climate anxiety is a common topic amongst the students they work with. While in Iceland, the impact is less palpable but rather transmitted through news and the media, in Zambia the consequences in water scarcity and droughts are much more directly noticeable. Children feel and share their frustration, the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the climate crisis. Margarita states that “It’s good to be in touch with people for whom climate change is an actual experience and not just a newsfeed in the media. I’d like to enable more teachers from my networks to make this experience and to learn from these different realities.” In the same vein Mugove believes that intercultural exchanges are an essential part of the process of building a better world.

Nonetheless, these children do have an impact – both Margarita and Mugove shared their experience that the children become their parents’ teachers. “Schools are a gateway to the local community” Margarita observes in her work. In Zambia, schools are also natural centres for their communities as the community members often visit their local school to attend meetings, church services and school functions. The school – in the long term – can thus become a place for transformation in the wider communities and local culture it is embedded in. To continue this transformative work, a question that inspires her work is to ask: “How can we empower the natural curiosity to learn that every child brings – instead of inhibiting it through fixed and institutionalised educational structures?”

Insights that are worth sharing and that continue sprouting from this Twinship: Regenerative education is not just a concept, but a lived experience, to work with the soil and to learn with all the senses. Education only becomes regenerative when teachers – as well as students – connect to their deeper motivations and intention, to what really matters to them. Why do I do what I do? And from this place teach and practise it in the world.