Special Focus : Learning Ecosystems: A New Paradigm in the Learning Experience

“I learned that in my community I learn”. What Ghizlane, a young woman from the Zouitina (Olive Tree) neighborhood community in Tangier, Morocco, told us was so simple and lucid that one could almost take it for granted. In her words, we felt our understanding of our lived experience, deepen and widen simultaneously.

She mirrored to all what we have experienced and witnessed as Tamkeen community facilitators and community members for over 10 years. That short sentence talks about the story of her growing sense of belonging to her community. It seamlessly expresses her awareness that she learned with her community “to be a community” and how its emerging ecology of trust, unconditional love, reciprocity and recognition, fosters learning. 

It effortlessly infers that she and her fellow community members have learned that they can choose what they want to learn; “violence was in our community but so was love, and we learned to express the love”. The community chose to “learn itself”, to learn how to learn, to co-create the conditions for learning, and to co-reflect that learning into a growing awareness of its choice to learn. 

Ghizlane was not allowed to finish her studies. She saw, at 11 years old, the doors to learning close with the imposed responsibility to take care of her younger siblings. Together with her neighborhood community, she learned that the door was never locked “I took off the blanket that suffocated me…”, and she adds “… life is beautiful; it is not like it was described to me”. Ghizlane became the author and the actor of, beyond a learning journey, her life. That process mutually arised with her community becoming a learning community. That becoming, further unfolded with the community seeing itself in the mirror of other communities. When members of surrounding neighborhoods said, “We want to be like you…”, “This model is what we want in our neighborhood, more than a thought it is a feeling…” to the youth of Zouitina they answered with an invitation to a co-created process of inquiry, learning and growing understanding rooted in trust in our human potential and unconditional love: “we will share with you our process but you will do it your own way…”