Profile area What if education could help restore, rather than deplete, the world of which we are a part? REGEN|ED explores practices that strengthen relationships between people and ecosystems while advancing social and ecological justice. Through seminars, reading circles, symposia, and collaborative research, we develop relational and place-based approaches that connect personal, collective, and systemic processes of change in order to imagine and co-create regenerative futures.
How can education respond to intertwined ecological, political, and social crises in ways that not only reduce harm, but actively contribute to livable futures for all?
REGEN|ED approaches this question through three entangled dimensions: inner transformation and a focus on healing and wellbeing, radical relationality and community practice, as well as systemic change rooted in and moving across bioregions. Together, these dimensions invite a rethinking of education as a transformative force for environmental and social justice.
On Regenerative Education
We understand regeneration as the restoration and strengthening of relationships between people, communities, and the living world. This involves cultivating inner capacities such as awareness, responsibility, and ethical responsiveness; fostering communal practices of care, reciprocity, and co-creation; and engaging systemic shifts in how education is organized, valued, and enacted. This approach is informed by diverse knowledge traditions, including critical, feminist, Indigenous, decolonial and queer perspectives.
A Collective
REGEN|ED is a space for collective inquiry, conversation, and community building. We connect research and practice through seminars, reading circles, symposia, and collaborative inquiry. Across these spaces, we engage simultaneously with inner, communal, and systemic dimensions: cultivating reflective and embodied practices, nurturing relational learning environments, and experimenting with alternative educational structures. Drawing on phenomenology, participatory action research, collective reflexive autoethnography, and art-based methodologies, we explore regenerative methods in situated, real-world, transdisciplinary contexts.
A long-term vision
Our aim is to cultivate an evolving international research environment that supports transformations across inner worlds, shared practices, and institutional systems. By developing new forms of knowledge, pedagogy, and collaboration, REGEN|ED seeks to contribute to educational futures that enable interdisciplinary, intercultural, interspecies, and collective flourishing within planetary boundaries and grounded in social and ecological justice.
Ongoing initiatives and future directions
Currently, several interconnected hybrid activities and projects are unfolding within the REGEN|ED community. Looking ahead, preparations are underway for the Living and Learning Regeneratively: Thriving with(in) the Planetary Boundaries symposium and writing retreat (August 26–31, 2026), which will bring participants together in a participatory, practice-based format to explore regeneration across domains such as education, relationships, and activism, with the aim of co-creating a collective publication through collaborative autoethnographic processes (read more about the event here).
Alongside this upcoming gathering, ongoing initiatives include a research collaboration on collective autoethnographic methodology, as well as two reflective learning spaces: a regenerative development, design, and education book circle, and an ecological humanities book circle. In addition, we are collaborating with the School of Architecture in a transdisciplinary project in which students designed and built the structure for the urban campus community garden at Umeå University. This collaboration bridges education, design, and regenerative practice through hands-on, place-based learning.
Modeller av Umeå universitetets campusträdgården framställd av arkitekturhögskolans studenter.
ImageKaterina Pia Günter
REGEN|ED officially began its four-year journey with the Regenerative Education Opening Days 2026 (January 19–23, 2026), marking a foundational moment to collectively explore what regenerative education can become in practice. This inaugural week was a space to connect, cultivate shared intentions, and begin co-creating a living learning ecosystem that nurtures care, creativity, and systemic transformation across personal, communal, and systemic dimensions.
Getting engaged
No prior knowledge of regenerative practice is required to join the community. Everyone is welcome from where they are, whether new to or already engaged with questions of sustainability, regeneration, or social and environmental justice and beyond. If you’re curious and feel called to learn more about regenerative practice and education with us, you are warmly invited to join by reaching out to katerina.gunter@umu.se.
REGEN|ED’s external members form a remarkably diverse and international network, spanning multiple continents and academic cultures. They are based across Europe, North America, and Australia, including cities such as Melbourne, Leuven, Montréal, Berkeley, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Bath, as well as a strong cluster of collaborators across Canada and the Nordic countries and partners in the United States. This broad geographic distribution reflects a globally connected community, bringing together perspectives shaped by different ecological, cultural, and educational contexts.
Equally important is the diversity of professional and institutional backgrounds represented. Members are affiliated not only with universities but also with botanical gardens, schools, and non governmental organizations, as well as working in applied settings such as farms. Their expertise spans natural sciences, architecture, agriculture, engineering, and related interdisciplinary fields, enriching the research environment with both theoretical and practice based knowledge.
The network also bridges all levels of education, from preschool and primary education through secondary schools to higher education and advanced research. This creates a unique continuum of perspectives on learning, teaching, and knowledge production, allowing insights to flow across age groups and institutional boundaries. Taken together, the external members constitute a vibrant, multifaceted community whose geographic reach and disciplinary breadth strengthen the research environment and foster innovative, cross sector collaboration.
