February 8, 11-4
$150
Berkeley, CA
Pre-registration is required; space is very limited
Please pay here (use the button for coaching and other services).
Nora Bateson, daughter of Gregory Bateson and creator of the film An Ecology of Mind, returns to the Bay Area to lead a daylong exploration into what happens when you live as if you are connected to everything else. We will have an opportunity to watch the movie during the workshop.
Workshop Summary
We know that the world is interconnected. Now what?
We also know that we are living in times of shifting paradigms. But, then life is not like a pick-up truck. We cannot simply replace parts and make adjustments to the systems we are inside of and think that they will be fixed. So how do we take the idea of interconnectedness to the next level, where we can start to see the dynamics of living contexts and respond accordingly?
Change is an ecological process. One in which learning and play step lightly together, pushing the boundaries of our perception; redrawing. Expanding our perception of the complexity we live within can reveal interactions we have never noticed. The emerging patterns that are shared by our many stories -- personal, professional, cultural, ecological, biological-- offer a different sort of engagement, another form of solution, a new level of questions, another dance.
Join Nora Bateson for a day seminar of diving into Bateson’s work on play and learning, including an explanation of Bateson’s Learning I, II, & III. And with those concepts in hand, begin working with the questions:
"How can we improve our ability to interact with the complexity we live within, so that our interactions are in sync with nature?
“Can we get some leverage in our thinking about how we respond to these overlapping patterns?“
“Can we see a larger context that allows us to play with our notions of learning and the evolution of our thinking?”
Detailed Workshop Description
Change is an ecological process. One in which learning and play step lightly together, pushing the boundaries of our perception; redrawing. Expanding our perception of the complexity we live within can reveal interactions we have never noticed. The emerging patterns that are shared by our many stories -- personal, professional, cultural, ecological, biological-- offer a different sort of engagement, another form of solution, a new level of questions, another dance.
Join Nora Bateson for a day seminar of diving into Bateson’s work on play and learning, including an explanation of Bateson’s Learning I, II, & III. And with those concepts in hand, begin working with the questions:
“Can we get some leverage in our thinking about how we respond to these overlapping patterns?“
“How can we see a larger context that allows us to play with our notions of learning and the evolution of our thinking?”
We are currently faced with a translation task. We carry narratives that are seemingly at odds. The story of the broken, the binary and the disenfranchised on the one hand, and on the other the clearing focus of a world of stories, woven and tangled in ever changing response to one another.
At the heart of complexity is uncertainty, which lifts the tone and aesthetic of our inquiry. Playing with ideas gives oxygen to their ecology, as learning not only expands our access to knowledge, but also expands our idea of how we actually learn, and even what learning or evolving is...
About Nora Bateson
Nora is a filmmaker, lecturer, writer, as well as director & producer of the award-winning documentary film An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson’s way of thinking. She has developed curricula for schools in Northern California, and produced and directed award winning multimedia projects on intercultural and ecological understanding. The film An Ecology of Mind offers audiences a lens through which to see the world that effects not only the way we see the world, but how we interact with it.
Nora teaches internationally, leading conversations and seminars with international change-makers, ecologists, anthropologists, psychologists, designers, and IT professionals. She has been utilizing the film as a tool to introduce some of Gregory Bateson’s thinking tools, asking the question: How can a better understanding of the dynamics of complex systems inform our capacity to respond to the world we live in?"
In addition to hosting discussions at film festivals from Brazil to Budapest, Nora Bateson is currently developing her next film and writing a book about the practical application of systems thinking and complexity theory in everyday life, entitled, “Small Arcs of Larger Circles”. Nora is uniquely qualified to facilitate cross disciplinary discussions. As an “interdisciplinary interloper” -- she travels between conversations in different fields and with different audiences bringing multiple perspectives into view to reveal larger patterns.
