Tending the Ruins, Seeding Possibilities

Reschooling Spiral 2025–2026, Open Call

Tending the Ruins, Seeding Possibilities is a yearlong course designed to practice the critical task of weaving knowledge into a fabric that can hold us through escalating social and ecological crises.

The course is inspired by the hand-sewing technique of backstitching, both as a practical method and a metaphor for nurturing a strong, adaptable and resilient web of responses, practices, methods, and proposals . Instead of resisting uncertainty, destabilisation, and collapse, we learn to work with and through them, stitching past, present, and future together in ways that honor repair and regeneration.

Building on the groundwork cultivated during the Autumn Attunement course (Fall 2024), this iteration invites participants to move through a full year of cycles—solar, lunar, tidal, and seasonal. We align with ecological rhythms, rituals, and regenerative cycles of sowing, growing, harvesting, and fallowing. These living practices of gratitude, grief, re-imagining, and embodied action are guided by land, ancestral wisdom, and collective memory.

The course blends critical inquiry, embodied practice, crafting, grief work, storytelling, unlearning exercises, regenerative activism, and hands-on workshops—such as fermentation and composting—combined with critical theory and collective reading. This radical pedagogy is designed to support participants in growing capacity to hold complexity and uncertainty, to engage in the decolonial work of dismantling oppressive systems, and to rehearse other ways of being, knowing, and sensing together.

If you feel called to join this journey of deep weaving, we invite you to step into the spiral with us.

Who is this course for?

Educators, facilitators, radical researchers, artists, (post) activists, and those engaged in socially and ecologically transformative work. It is especially designed for people seeking to develop facilitation skills, and growing their capacity as trainers and educators. The course offers a strong training-for-trainers component so you can bring the practices to your local communities.

We embrace a broad definition of art and activism, including creative practice, craft, education, research, and creative inquiry. Activism is understood in its pluriversal forms of resistance, renewal and resilience.

This course is especially for those who feel called to:

• Facilitate decolonial and regenerative learning spaces;
• Engage with storytelling, ritual, and Earth-based practices as tools for transformation;
• Develop skills in holding space for grief and repair;
• Move towards collective and embodied action with discernment, accountability and humility;
• Weave non-extractive art practices into education, activism and solidarity work.

Why now?

The disintegration of the existing system – an entangled mesh of (racial) capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial power – is unfolding before our eyes. We must create space to collectively explore what is required of us at this time. How do we tend to its ruins with care, discernment, and responsibility? And how do we create the conditions for new possibilities to emerge?

This yearlong spiral program invites us to metabolise the wounds of colonial extractivism, work through social and ecological collapse, and learn with queer, ancestral, and Earth-based ways of being, knowing, and sensing.

Principles and methodologies

1. Transformative learning and unlearning

Rather than repurposing or reshaping pieces of a harmful system, we focus on tending to and metabolising its ruins for new possibilities to emerge.

Transformative learning creates the opportunity to change ourselves, creating reverberating shifts within communities, institutions, and systems. We embrace fractal processes—“what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system” (adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy).

2. Spiritual activism

We take a holistic and decolonial approach to activism, integrating inner-spiritual, and outer-political practice. With this philosophy, we move beyond individual healing modalities–such as contemplation, meditation, and private rituals—and beyond conventional political activism –such as protests, demonstrations, and rallies. Spiritual activism, as shaped by Gloria Anzaldúa, is humble and relational, engaging the spirit, the inner life force, in working through social and ecological collapse with regenerative tools and practices. It is a practice of decentering the human and honoring interdependence with all beings.

3. Decolonial / anti-colonial praxis

Spiritual, regenerative, postactivist education strengthens decolonial work—the work of addressing, unlearning, and dismantling colonial logics, behaviours, attachments, entitlements, and compulsions. Decolonial work is relational; it requires humility, reciprocity, and attunement to the living cycles of decay, decomposition, transformation, and renewal.

4. Commitment to solidarity and repair

What is required of us at these times? How do we prepare for deepening crises? How do we make sure we practice active solidarity within our communities and movements?  This course explores these questions and aims to cultivate embodied responsibility—acknowledging histories and presents of harm while taking concrete steps toward repair within the landscapes we inhabit and the relationships we nurture. From wetlands to dunes to tidal ecosystems, we engage in active solidarity and care, restoring and reweaving our relationships with land, water, and each other.

Practical details

🌱 Enrollment opens May 1st. Pre-registration is available now.
🌱 Course duration: September 15, 2025 – July 10, 2026.
🌱 21 online sessions covering a full spiral of tools, methods, and resources for regenerative and transformative practices.
🌱 18 in-person sessions held bi-weekly on Fridays, 13:00 – 17:00 CET in Amsterdam.
🌱 Online sessions take place bi-weekly on Mondays, 19:00 – 21:00 CET.
🌱 For the in-person group: Two deep-dive gatherings per solar cycle (one in Spring, one in Autumn), each spanning two full days.
🌱 Curriculum & final program will be shared in June.
🌱 Full access to online resources, including videos, exercises, readings, grounding practices, and tools.
🌱 Self-organized study groups for peer learning and reflection.
🌱 Flexible participation: Participants may choose to join online-only from their own location.
🌱 For online participants: We encourage enrolling in pairs or small groups, with local practice buddies in your area—someone to engage with in embodied exercises.

Schedule

Online gatherings are on Monday evenings 19.00 – 21.00 CET.
In-person gatherings are on Friday afternoons, 13.00 – 17.00 CET in the same week as the online meetings. We start the in-person gatherings having lunch together.
Location of In-Person gatherings: Derde Kostverlorenkade 35, 1054 TS Amsterdam.

Contributions

Our courses are offered in the spirit of mutual generosity and long-term commitment. “Reschooling with” is supported by a registered not-for-profit organisation Quelcayya Foundation and run by freelance-artists-educators-moms. It is being built with generosity and voluntary labor (which is not included in the ‘real cost’ calculation). At the moment, we don’t have public or private funding or any independent means of financing the project. Therefore, we need financial contributions to make the project viable.

We aim to make the course as accessible as possible. Therefore, we offer sliding scales based on your financial standing. The range between the scales reflect the striking inequality in economic conditions between different members of society and parts of the world. We are currently working on raising funds to be able to offer scholarships to individuals that aren’t able to contribute financially. If your current financial standing is not reflected in the scheme below, please reach out to us. We will try to find ways for you to participate.

The middle scale reflects the basic real cost required to make the course possible. If you can offer more than the middle rate we suggest, then please do. This will help to support the ongoing development of the work and enable others who are more economically marginalised to have access to the course. We trust your discernment.

If you have a business, we can offer an invoice. Alternatively, you can contribute with a tax-deductible donation.