Heathcote Education Center
The Education Commons
Heathcote continues School of Living’s original mission-purpose of personal and community development. Applied sharing of resources promoting social equity, informal learning for preservation of cultural living memory, and improving land tenure have always been pillars of our community land trust organization. Land trusts brought together shared needs, re-establishing ‘the commons’ for the purpose of building social bonds and relationships through shared solutions and the positive effect of space and proximity on cultural development. School of Living could be thought of as the education commons where the community is invited to participate in knowledge and skills rather than simply receive them.
Democratizing Knowledge and Learning
Heathcote’s School of Living education initiatives have included workshops, projects, and life-initiatives encompassing organic/bio agriculture, ecological restoration, craft skills, and medicinal folk knowledge, alternative energy, health, and nutrition. In addition, HEC is now newly dedicated to bridging the knowledge and needs of urban and rural communities as well as among different generations. Food systems and climate resiliency can be improved through agro-ecology, equity, and urban greening for the benefit of people and environment. HEC programs and residencies seek to encourage BIPOC and other non-normative or non-white leadership through project partnerships, learning/teaching opportunities, personal support, and technical resource sharing. Our programs advance social equity through use of traditional and informal sources of knowledge and knowledge transmission with the benefit of being more inclusive of historically marginalized and ‘left-behind or recovered’ knowledge communities in a more personally relevant setting.
School of Living life-learning is an experiment in teaching and learning. It is a self-initiated and self-directed mode of knowledge sharing. Participants are directed toward life-long education covering practical activities and cultural development of the person and community for the purpose of improved living in the world as it is and to pre-figure what can be. Shared participation in human-scale community development here on-site, by hybrid technology, at partner sites, and through extended media is as much a part of Heathcote as the old historic mill. When renovated, the mill will serve as our virtual country schoolhouse and the organic farm that was first planted by the Anacher family here will be an outdoor learning and demonstration opportunity.
See our list of upcoming classes and workshops, or suggest one of your own that Heathcote can partner with or sponsor. HEC is a self-help cooperative dedicated to access for both teachers and learners since its dedication by the School of Living in 1967.