About Reschooling With

‘Reschooling with’ is a transformative learning community for earth-based practices. We rehearse alternatives to the capitalist-colonial-heteropatriarchal system, different ways of living and learning based on reciprocity, attunement and humility.

By tapping into the rhythms and cycles of our bodies, celestial beings, the seasons, and Earth we learn to move, create and act with the energy of the wider web of life to which we are part of. We learn and practice ways to orient ourselves and our practices in relation to the more-than-human world. We open up to other cosmologies while we unsettle the dominant ones.

“Re” focuses on reimagining and rehearsing ways of living that align with the worlds we know are possible. Re for increased responsibilities, encouraging us to respond differently in times of crisis. The course uses the metaphor of composting to gesture towards (com)post-capitalism, post-activism, and post-extractivism, creating fertile ground for new possibilities.

“Schooling” involves unlearning the extractive colonial patterns ingrained in our bodies and relearning in attunement with the more-than-human world. The term “schooling” is redefined, moving away from traditional, hierarchical classroom structures. “Reschooling with” aims to create liberatory, playful learning spaces that center embodied, earth-based, and relational pedagogies, challenging the dominant narratives of education.

The course embraces “with” as a principle of relationality, cultivating a non-hierarchical, non-extractive, multispecies, intersectional, queer feminist learning community rooted in care and attunement. It challenges the extractive patterns of the capitalist-colonial-heteropatriarchal system, fostering a methodology of learning ‘with’ rather than ‘from’ each other, so we can expand our capacity for holding responsibility for our place in the larger web of life.

‘Reschooling with’ nurtures two processes of un/learning:

> Tuning into the rhythms, cycles and vibrations of the web of life, languages of intuition, and ancestral and cosmic kinship.

> Tuning out human-centric, separatist, colonial, hetero-patriarchal, white-supremacist, ecocidal, individualist, productivist, universalist, solutionist, reductionist logics and behaviors. Tuning out means acknowledging harm, investigating with discernment, and dismantling with responsibility.

These are non-linear and parallel processes, forming an ongoing cycle of transformation.

Core values

Transformation

Transforming ourselves so we can change the world, and allowing that transforming the world can change us.

Commitment

Embodying and enacting our responsibility as a form of devotion. What are we called to do and be in this life?

Attunement

Allowing all our senses and imagination to tune into the rhythms and voices of Earth. Tuning out toxic paradigms.

Humility

Rooting in our place/time on Earth, in the humus of Earth. Knowing that we are a small part of the larger web of life and from there we act-do-think in relationship and reciprocity.

Reciprocity

Giving and receiving in a non-transactional flux of relationships that are nourishing instead of extractive, expressed in time, energy, power relations, money and flow of resources.

Reschooling with is composted and fermented with

Teresa Borasino

(she/her) is an artist-researcher and educator. Her practice spans a variety of mediums, including writing, performance, interventions, video essays, and artistic gatherings, as well as teaching, cultural production, facilitation, training, and eco-social justice organizing.

Teresa was co-founder of Fossil Free Culture, an artist collective working to end oil and gas sponsorship in the arts. From 2021-2023, she initiated the Disobedient Art School, a pedagogical experiment for artistic practices for social liberation. Currently, she is the convener of Towards Post-Extractive Cultures. Since 2017, she has given numerous courses, workshops, and trainings on art and activism –including training for trainers– for grassroots groups and artists. Since 2020, Teresa integrates decolonial, non-extractive, regenerative, and relational practices into her teaching programmes.

In 2021, Teresa embarked on artistic research into the Andean cosmovision and its rich tapestry of ancestral knowledges and practices. She is currently researching the interplay between cultural erasure and (lithium) extractivism in the Southern Andes of Peru.

Shailoh Phillips

(she/they) is an artist, writer, community organizer, slow activist, educator and undisciplinary action researcher who creates participatory interventions. They have been working along the cracks in the cultural field for over 15 years, mainly for museums, public television, artist-run spaces and online platforms. She cultivates imaginaries and works to rekindle our ability to attune, perceive, respond and act in face of catastrophes. She is a fractal systems thinker who seeks out how large-scale collective issues manifest in the microcosm of daily life, and how internal work ripples out into system change.

Originally trained in cultural anthropology, cultural analysis and philosophy, she holds an MA in Education in Arts (Piet Zwart Institute). Previously, she was coordinator of the Media Lab at RIjksmuseum, was part of Tools for Action collective, and was co-founder of Salwa Foundation, amplifying and supporting the voices of artists with a migration background. She is currently working on a PhD in narrative psychology in Palliative care, finding ways of supporting people with incurable cancer (University of Twente, Artez, UMC) with art-based learning sessions.