The Berlin Re-imagination Sessions

Live, Work, Play, Learn

(a series of four workshops offering space for the liberation and re-creation of learning)

Where this starts from

This is the post-information age. Everything is Google-able, and what isn’t will soon be created by AI. At last, education and learning are regaining the freedom to dig deeper and go beneath the surface of providing info and getting people to know things.

Can we get back to the essence of learning please? Learning to interact with the system, with each other, and with our environments, will be what makes the difference in edtech next.

In this workshop, learn with us what learning has always been about if only we wouldn’t have forgotten. If we wouldn’t have had to carry and pass on that burden of information. If we wouldn't have gotten stuck ion the linearity of not knowing > someone teaching you > knowing > being okay. 

In this workshop, information makes place for exformation.

Read more about the conundrum of linearity here.

Where this leads

Learning in professional environments is rarely organic, a lived experience, and often not without pressure. Francis Laleman (click for bio), a bridge builder from East to West, invites you to a two-day workshop in four modules (bookable also individually) in order to explore the wonders of playful learning and the mutual empowerment of motion, from Participatory Design & Meaningful Engagement to Exformative Learning Design & Facilitation, to play-based learning (Games for Actors & Non-Actors) and Theatre of the Oppressed (inspire by the work of Augusto Boal), entails. 

Here is the crux: To (learn to) facilitate co-designing, co-learning, co-creation and collaboration, inside out.

The outcome

This program is very much like a retreat - where participants get immersed in a world of possibilities, an ocean of creative waves that help us reimagine the sense and nonsense of how we are getting about in shaping and reshaping the world and our societies for the future. 

Go home with a refreshed mind, but even so with a wide choice of hands-on tools and methodologies, ready for use in your own practice and waiting for you to develop further in your own environments and contexts.

For whom

This is for the curious. This workshop is for you if organizational development and learning are your passions. Whether you are an instructional or process designer, a (learning) experience or UX designer, organizational developer, facilitator, trainer, educator, social worker, systemic facilitator, HR specialist, or any role related to competency and talent in individuals and groups - for change.

Your facilitator: Francis Laleman

is a Singapore-based Asia Studies specialist, Sanskrit and Pali teacher, and non-conventional educationist, who moved from academics (pursuing a doctorate in historical Buddhism in India) to being an apprentice monk, and from there to social work and non-conventional education. He has been designing, using and teaching non-conventional facilitation methodologies for more than 40 years - in Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong SAR), the Gulf (Emirates, Oman, Kuwait), the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon), South-America (Argentina, Uruguay), and Europe and the UK.

Read bio here 
Francis Laleman Link Tree

The Program

There are four 200 minutes modules. 
Participants can enroll for the modules separately, or for the whole series.

Participatory Design & Meaningful Engagement (M1) 
=Live, Learn=

A workshop for HR professionals, trainers and facilitators of change and transformation processes. In this short workshop, you will be introduced to two methods that ensure that your employees "stay on board" even in the most difficult circumstances. You will learn the basic techniques of participatory design, a participatory design method that involves the end user in the development process from the very beginning. Then you'll be introduced to meaningful engagement - a method to engage young adults in their own development opportunities. The framework was originally developed at the United Nations and the WHO and is now widely practiced around the world in a variety of organizational settings.

Co-creating a creative space for co-design and facilitation of learning is very much like a lumbung - a concept taken from Indonesian village architecture and brought to the public's attention by the ruangrupa art collective (Jakarta) at documenta fifteen (Kassel, 2022)

Learn more about participatory design from UX Magazine

Check out the UN's meaningful engagement toolkit
Find out more about lumbung as a space for co-creation

Exformative Learning Design & Facilitation (M2) 
=Live, Learn, Play=

A workshop for trainers and facilitators with an appetite for reverse didactics. Exformation is a systemic learning process that begins in the unknown - and distills learning content from there. In exformative learning design, practice and experience come first - and theories and models are extracted form lived experiences at a later stage. Participants engage on their own and are graciously facilitated by the process facilitator.

Check out the Exformation Wikipedia page.

Read this paper by Francis Laleman, published by the Systemic Design Association (RSD11).
Exformative action as workshop design and facilitation principle
Get your own copy of Francis Laleman's book on exformation.

Play-based learning: Games for Actors & Non-Actors (M3) 
= Learn, Play=

This workshop explores the idea of learning as an activity of play. Both playful learning and play-based learning are natural processes: we all experience this in childhood - and it is only when we start being treated by grown-ups as "worthy of being like grown-ups" that we are systemically being steered away from our faculties of play. This causes alienation and oppression. 

Inspired by methods offered by Augusto Boal (Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 1992) and others, and grown out of fieldwork done by Francis Laleman in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines,  series of play-based learning forms for systemic learning. You'll also learn when and how to incorporate Boal's play forms into your organization's learning package - and when and how to debrief them. Hands off and no chairs or tables in the room. This is an action-oriented workshop you will not soon forget!

Games for Actors and Non-Actors (pdf)

Theatre of the Oppressed, Creative Space of Liberation (M4)
=Live, Work, Play, Learn=

This workshop brings us back to of point of departure: We live in an post-information age - and this provides us with the opportunity to liberate us and our communities and organizations from the oppressive character that has been the hallmark of learning and education for so long, since we started working with the hierarchies of knowledge is power and power decides on knowledge.

In this short workshop we work with improvisations, fluid scenarios and unplanned encounters - three basic elements for social interaction and social interaction-based learning activities. You will be introduced to legendary Brazilian educator Augusto Boal (1931-2009), learn to plan half-scenarios and half-questions, practice invisible theatre (an idea by Yoshi Oida) and go outside into the forum to put it all into practice.

Lessons taken from Yoshi Oida's Invisible Theatre (Francis Laleman)

Theatre of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire)
Confronting Legacies of Oppression in Education (Francis Laleman)

To attend

The programs takes place at the Atelier Gardens - Campus for Urban Regeneration. Participants can attend the workshops separately or the whole series. From the "Register Here" button, please select the tickets that suit your circumstances (corporate or privately paid). Taxes, if applicable, are included. Every participant is sent an appropriate invoice upon receipt of payment.

Let not money come in the way of your self-development. If the price is a barrier, please contact the organizer. The organizers and participants of this event join hands in making it possible for everyone to attend.

Nederlandstalige sessies 

In partnership with HRD Academy (Belgium), this program is also offered in Belgium, in Dutch, on March 25-26.
Check out this page