Learning Journeys

Experiential professional development opportunities for Individuals & School/Community Groups

Learning is ‘Better Together’

These experiential learning opportunities offer a see/feel relational approach to learning and leadership to enhance the traditional analytical think approach. This wholistic approach to educational processes nurtures new perspectives and understandings as well as professional connections that enhance everyone’s learning and promotes system change.

The Center brings 30 years of experience to these personal and professional learning journeys, where we have explored the process of change with thousands of people. From senior citizens to high school youth, from the superintendent to parents, from international educators to local community volunteers, from writers to teachers of writing, and more recently educators, community leaders and parents from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and England; all have spent from a weekend to a couple of weeks seeking new ideas and strategies for learning and living in a world clearly characterized by increasing connectedness, tremendous diversity, rapid, pervasive change and a sense of urgency to find new ways to educate every child to their full potential.

Why these Learning Journeys?

Approaches to improving education have to missed the mark by almost any standard. Dropout rates are high. Those who do graduate and enter the workforce are often functionally illiterate and under motivated. Demands on professional educators increase at the same alarming rate as resources seem to diminish.

Research reports tout the role that creativity, inventiveness, personal character and mental health play in the success of any community or nation while school squeezes time and energy from these arenas in their effort to raise test scores. We recognize that our future is our children while newspapers and social media report daily on the increase in poverty, homelessness, suicide and violence that defines life for more and more of our youth.

Solidly into the 21st Century, many of us have come to recognize that working hard does not guarantee success. Good intentions aren’t enough, either. In fact, one would have to conclude that our strategies for changing schools and experiences of children have collectively done more harm than good.

Unless one believes that more money and simply working harder will turn this downward spiral around; the best we can do is spend our time and money on radically different approaches to educational change. The learning journeys the Center has partnered, designed and facilitated over 30 years have transformed educators and their organizations as no other professional and personal learning can do.

Why Northern New Mexico?

New Mexico is a laboratory of relationships, past, present and future. It’s more diverse in more ways than most places. From culture, history, geography, geology, politics and ideas, it is truly a place where edges meet. Today it serves as a microcosm for all the issues we face in the 21st Century. This makes New Mexico the ideal context for addressing the challenges of educating in the 21st Century.

Journey Themes

A number of themes, design principles and beliefs have emerged from these living-learning journeys. Every learning journey is planned to maximize these experiences as they are continually confirmed as personally and professionally transformative.

For change to occur, people have to reach beyond the boundaries they have created for themselves or their organizations and institutions.

The self becomes the best teacher, following from the teaching that when the student is ready the teacher will appear.

We believe that every individual has direct access to inner wisdom, to a deeply personal sense of rightness and reality.

We believe that people need community if they are to grow personally and professionally, a community of mutual trust in which we can share deeply, challenge honestly, and affirm generously.

We believe that learning happens on many levels and not in the mind alone: it happens also through feelings, intuitions, and a sense of beauty, through work, laughter and tears, through a rhythm of solitude and relatedness that reaches into every level of our lives.

And finally, we believe that every person who seeks personal truth in community is working not just for self but for a world in need: the truth within calls us to live more fully in justice and in peace.

These active, experiential learning opportunities are based and conducted in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico unless specified. Programs include all activities, consultancy and support materials. Airfares, transport, meals and accommodation at participants own cost unless specified. The Center for RelationaLearning can assist with accommodation arrangements. For more specific details please contact the center directly: info@relationalearning.com