This means that no discipline holds the privilege of yielding knowledge: what we discover is discovered between us all. Boundaries between disciplines are not where something ends, but where something else begins. Education is not one particular task, but the whole of life - a life-centric, earth-infused, organic process. Learning means to form and be formed by the fabric of being, to follow the warp and weft of the world, to plunge our hands in the soil with care, to hear the antiphonal music of the more-than-human. Learning does not merely occur in a classroom, but also in a kitchen, on the land, by the fire, singing as well as speaking, being still as well as moving, making as well as thinking.

Our educational practice is convivial, which means: we ask good questions in good company. We value dialogue over suspicion, we foster reciprocity over rupture, we cultivate encounter rather than enclosure. We believe it is attention and care rather than hostile rhetoric, gift rather than entitlement and reconciliation rather than grievance that can change the world.

In a world that often encourages fast-pace living, inattentive thinking and anxiety-ridden action, we nurture slowness and depth. We explore the deep time of the earth, the deep time of our thoughts, the deep time of our language and our stories. As well as small, we believe that slow, too, is beautiful.

We carry with us our long tradition of education as an endeavour for heads, hearts and hands. Ecological learning is not just about cognitive improvement and the acquirement of skills, but about the transformation of the whole person, so that we in turn can serve, dialogue and collaborate with communities, our own as well as others, and learn genuinely and lovingly to dwell in the world.

This endeavour is as ambitious as it is humble: ambitious because it calls for a dynamic, continuous creative dialogue between all of us; humble because this dialogue must return us to where we are, in radical honesty. To be humble literally means to be ‘of the earth’, and so to encounter one another and to think and be with the more-than-human world also means to acknowledge where we are, who we are, our roots, our branches and our longings, with honesty and humility, and in openness to the whole.