Education as Ecosystem Weaving
Where does the transformative potential of education truly lie?
Modern societies often treat education as a subsystem — a pipeline for human capital, citizenship, or innovation. This model radically repositions education as something much deeper: a meta-systemic process of weaving together ecosystems that support life, learning, and mutual becoming.
🧶 Education Beyond Schooling Rather than equating education with curriculum or school structures, this framework views education as a relational force that:
Shapes how people co-become with others, society, and nature
Guides how individuals and collectives reproduce, renew, or regenerate themselves
Understood this way, education becomes the interface between individuals and ecosystems — mediating growth across personal, cultural, institutional, and ecological scales.
🌱 The Weaving Metaphor Where most reform efforts seek to “fix” the education system from its components (e.g. better assessments, modernized standards), this model asks:
What ecosystems of care, meaning, and adaptation are required for people and societies to flourish — and how can education weave them together?
This reframing casts education as:
Root: grounding identity, coherence, and self-cultivation
Web: integrating fragmented sectors — from agriculture to governance, digital life to spirituality
Rhythm: pacing and synchronizing growth, healing, and renewal across life stages
🧠 Practical Implications
Design: Education becomes a method for systems prototyping — aligning community, governance, livelihood, and environment.
Governance: Calls for distributed, relational, and responsive models beyond centralized curriculum mandates.
Metrics: Moves away from standardized output-based assessment to context-sensitive indicators of vitality, equity, and participation.
This logic is particularly powerful in contexts where traditional educational institutions have been alienated from, e.g.,
Local needs and identities
Civic imagination and democratic practice
Environmental limits and cultural plurality
🌏 Field Application & Impact I have applied this model through:
Regional revitalization projects in Taiwan, integrating place-based exploratory learning with local economies and cultural memory to prevent the pipeline for sending winners to cities while keeping losers in the rural areas
National Development Council’s education innovation task force and Taiwan International Education Summits, where education was reframed as a driver of inter-ministerial systems change
IRAEEH (International Research & Action Alliance for Experimental Higher Education), advocating for higher education models "as" sustainable development, not just "for" sustainable development
Cross-border collaborations, where “education” became the common language for post-pandemic futures, civic resilience, and glocal innovation
Read more
🎞️Keynote at IDEC 2020: Yes, Taiwan made Alternative Education The Trend!
📰[in Traditional Chinese] ZA Share — Weaving webs of imagination for Taiwan's Education and Future
📝[in Traditional Chinese] Agenda Setting for "Taiwan Education Vision 2032"
See also
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