A guide to Learning Festivals

Sometimes, we feel that the title ‘Learning Festival’ is a little misleading. It makes it sound as if it is a celebration. The problem is that, at one level, it is indeed a celebration. But, the Learning Festival operates at different levels and, when it works well, it will go far beyond a celebration of what has happened. The intent of the Learning Festival is firmly on the future, on what is going to happen.

In a Learning Festival, we bring together groups that wish to respond to a challenge that they face or that are responding to a challenge that they face. When we started to organise Learning Festivals, we were very specific about the experience of those that attended a Learning Festival needed to have. Over time, we have learned that as long as those attending wish to respond to a challenge that they face, the process will work. We have found that all such people have something that they wish to learn. And, perhaps more surprisingly, they all have something that they wish to share.

The objectives of the Learning Festival

Stage 1

The starting point for the Learning Festival is appreciation of strengths: appreciation of the strength of our peers and appreciation of our own strengths. ‘When we look back over the last 12 months, what are we most proud of?’ is a good starting question. We are usually more than willing to lament our lack of progress to the extent that we fail to reflect on the progress that we have made.

We rarely give ourselves the time and the space to ask ourselves a question like this and the result is almost always joyful. But in the Learning Festival, reflection on what we are most proud of is never a solitary experience: it will always be done as part of a group. We reflect with our peers on what we are most proud of. And that means that others listen to us and we listen to others as we explore what makes us proud of ourselves.

At a very early Learning Festival in Chiang Mai in Thailand, Usa Duongsaa commented, “The atmosphere was exuberant and vibrant with spontaneity, curiosity and enthusiasm.” Since that early Learning Festival, we have seen the same response consistently all around the world. Jean-Louis Lamboray noticed the same phenomenon and commented, “I have been reflecting on this joyfulness and I am still reflecting. But when you give people the chance to learn from THEM, that gives THEM dignity. And that generates happiness."

This is a very good start to the process, but it is only the start.

Stage 2

The next level of learning is more challenging. Most of us are usually more than happy that we have learned such a lot after visiting a group or attending an event. And we are usually willing to talk in broad terms about what we have learned. But when we are challenged to be specific about what we have learned, things become less clear. And when we are challenged to articulate our learning in a way that the learning can be used by, and be useful to, others, we often struggle.

In order to address these challenges, we tell stories. When we tell a story we decouple an event from a continuous narrative. Life is not ‘one thing after another’, but becomes a set of experiences from which we have the opportunity to learn. In addition, when we tell a story we introduce the idea of causality. The lesson that I take from this experience is that when I did this, then that happened. That insight becomes the basis of a future action: perhaps I will take that action in the same context, perhaps I will take it in a related context, or perhaps I will take it in a completely different context. In all cases, I have opened up the possibility of learning from my experiences.

Our aim during this work is to begin to document the lessons learned by the participants in the form of stories with this particular structure. And once the stories have been documented they can begin to be shared with others. We can document the stories in written text or orally (sound or video).

For some groups, this part of the Learning Festival can be quite straightforward and enjoyable. For others it is a daunting challenge.

In the course of this exercise, people tell their stories to each other more than once. As they work on their stories, the narrative becomes more concise and the lessons learned become more specific. During this phase, people begin to have a sense that knowledge is accumulating. This is not just about the experience of an individual or a single group, but there is something larger than that at work. We are beginning to accumulate experience and knowledge that can be useful to us.

But often another beautiful and more subtle thing is happening. Here is a quotation from another Learning Festival, this time in Curitiba in Brazil where representatives from different cities were brought together. “The best experience was to see that the problems of the cities are very similar and that when we share knowledge, together we can find more and better solutions than we can find on our own.” A representative from Sao Paolo, a megapolis in the south of the country put it more directly, “In our group, there was a woman from Manacapuru. This is a town in the middle of the Amazon with 60,000 inhabitants: I had never heard of it before. What I understood was that their forest is made of trees and my forest is made of concrete buildings. Our problems are not very different. Everything that happens in Manacapuru, I can make use of in Sao Paolo.”

During this stage of the Learning Festival, there is a developing sense that we are not alone, that our problems are not unique and that we can learn from the experience of others (and that our own experiences can be useful to others).

Stage 3

In the next stage of the Learning Festival, we begin to bring together the stories that have been told. At one level, this can be a profoundly moving event. ‘This has come from us. This is what we have done. This is what we have learned.’ All of us spend most of our time at the level of detail and at this level things feel difficult and confused. It is only when we step back from this complexity and confusion that we appreciate just how far we have come. If Stage 1 was about joy, this stage can bring surprise and satisfaction from the participants. It is as if they are saying to themselves, ‘Are we really capable of this?’ And, of course the answer is yes.

But once again, there is a deeper purpose for bringing this material together. We find that the lessons that we have learned from the stories are linked. The stories group themselves together and we begin to see patterns. We can begin to see consistent principles that allow us to have a deeper understanding of what we have done. We reflect on the material and we refine it. We begin to see the material as the basis for our future action: we begin to see the content as a repository of what we have learned from our experience: we begin to see this as the beginning of something on which we can build. We call this a Knowledge Asset.

The Mauritius Learning Festival—an example

The Constellation helped to organise a Learning Festival in Mauritius in April 2016. The purpose of the festival was for communities in Mauritius to share their experiences with each other and with others from around the world. The event took place over 4 days and involved communities across the island.

You can find a description of the Mauritius Learning Festival at https://sites.google.com/a/communitylifecompetence.org/the-mauritius-learning-festival/

This page describes what happened.

This page leads to the stories that we shared during the Learning Festival.

This page contains the Knowledge Asset based on those stories.