Learning EVENTS

Learning together where the action is

The Constellation in partnership with the Kenyan Team

Presents:

Virtual Global Learning Festival 2021

 

Theme:

Anchoring the energy for sustainable local response

How communities learn and adapt to old and new challenges

Friday 1- Monday 4 October 2021

“When so many people come together, they come with different energies and different games and songs and different approaches. That creates a lot of fun in the learning”.

“You don’t feel alone doing what you are doing in different corners of the world”

Ranganayaki Thangavelu – The Constellation Global Learning Festival 2018 – Bandung, Indonesia

Participants in The Constellations 2017 Global Learning Festival in Entebbe, Uganda, learned from the local older persons. They could apply the lessons in their own and in their professional lives.

Dr. Jean-Louis Lamboray recounts: “As a public health doctor I have overlooked the power, the capacity of older persons to care for themselves and to care for the broader community all my professional life”.

Dolores Rey-Novoa learned: “If this man, at this age, can still dream… why shouldnot I?”

Learning Festival: more than a pleasant exchange of experiences

A Learning Festival can be held around a table with a small group or it can be a much larger gathering of people.

It is an opportunity for individuals and groups to come together to learn-and-share from each other.

When The Constellation started to organise Global Learning Festivals, the overwhelmingly positive response took us by surprise.

People talked about them being joyful experiences. People enjoy learning from the experiences of others, they enjoy sharing their own experiences with others and they enjoy seeing what new possibilities can arise from these experiences.

However, a Learning Festival is more than a pleasant exchange of experiences. We use the technique of story telling to shape and to document the experiences and the lessons learned from those experiences that people bring to the event.

We then use these stories to build Knowledge Assets that represent the shared wisdom of those who come to the Learning Festival. There is no doubt that some of us find this discipline of telling stories hard work, but people are usually very satisfied with the result of their efforts.

 SALT visit: a simple and powerful idea

We also organise (online and offline) inspirational visits to communities and groups in The Constellation network. During these visits, we recognise that we are not coming with solutions or “interventions” for the community, but we go to the community to listen and to learn.

A SALT Visit is a simple but powerful idea. We go to have a conversation with a group of people that uses the ideas of SALT.

The first and most important objective of our visit is to appreciate what a community is doing. We seek to identify and to name the strengths that the community displays through the actions they are already taking.

We mostly return home with a bag filled with inspiration and new ideas.