Current Activities

2002 Mary Parker Follett Conversation on Creative Democracy
The first annual International Mary Parker Follett Conversation on Creative Democracy took place from October 17-20, 2002, in Boise, Idaho. Proceedings are available by clicking here. This file requires Adobe Acrobat to open.

Designing Communities of Learning

Designing Communities of Learning is a program within the Foundation's Participatory Design of Social Systems interest area. This program is focused on educational transformation through the participatory, idealized re-design of public education in a community context. The complete Program Guidebook for Designing Communities of Learning can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here.

The program's initial focus is the practical demonstration of a dramatically different approach to the change of systems of public education. In the demonstration phase of this program, 90 to 120 diverse residents of a participating community will design a mythical school district for their community without regard to the assumptions, structure, and operations of the existing system. They will utilize a disciplined and creative process called Participatory Idealized Design that helps them transcend their existing image of education.

The following are the core assumptions behind this program:

1. If a community today had to design a system of learning and human development (public education system) completely from scratch, it would not look like what they have today.
2. The only way to know if the present system is the best possible is to design the ideal and then look at the present system in light of that ideal.
3. Only the users of a system have the right to design that system.

The demonstration experience is intended to foster design readiness within a community. Residents of that community may later consider undertaking the full-scale redesign of educational and other institutions.

The Foundation offers Designing Communities of Learning as an alternative to conventional educational improvement, reform, and restructuring efforts that tend to be reactive and do not address the underlying mismatch between change in society, change in education, and the aspirations of educational stakeholders.