The Foundations of the SolarPunk Sangha

Welcome to the SolarPunk Sangha! This is the introductory module to the Sangha and its philosophy of Critical Sustainability. I am Ravi Bajnath, founder of the SolarPunk Sangha. In this module we’re unveiling the research and development that went into creating this educational project and brief introduction to the technology that currently powers our content. Before we get into deep philosophical inquiries on the nature of reality, I’d like to make the surrounding context more accessible for the best user experience on this new platform.

Behind the buttons you’re clicking on, or the is a story of opportunity and optimism sorely lacking in the educational technology sector. I’ll keep it short, the applications I used while obtaining my degree through the University of Central Florida was a substandard experience and I wanted to build something better. This was not a terrible experience, but for the nuances of learning online and how you, the student, are subjected to a specific way of being taught (pedagogy) through these online platforms. This previous statement will be explored in this course and others to help restructure the way we experience education closer to how it relates to our lives and not towards legacy academic models.

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Critical Sustainability

This Exploration course investigates the nature of consciousness and the development of a pedagogical framework called the Tesseract. An outline of the upcoming modules will explore branches of philosophy that establish the teaching foundations of the SolarPunk Sangha:

1. Ontology (Being): In our first module, I will introduce the works of Roy Bhaskar and the field of Critical Realism which introduces social scientific methods to help us reflect on upcoming lessons. 
2. Epistemology (Knowing): In our second module, I will review Bruno della Chiesa’s Tesseract Hypotheses, a multi-dimensional way of knowing-and-being, with extensions to his theory from the research offered in the previous module.
3. Metaphysics (Reality): In our third module, we will investigate Eastern and Western viewpoints of consciousness with our current understanding of classical and quantum sciences.
4. Axiology (Ethos): In our fourth, but not necessarily concluding module, we’re connecting the reality affirming lessons from the previous lessons to form a combined understanding of how to transform reality through the ethics and values of Critical Sustainability.

💡  Enquiry and Learning

Contributing to our Circles of Social Life curriculum, we are exploring the domain of Culture with an academic focus on the humanities and social sciences. Paul James in his Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice: Circles of Sustainability developed this research model and has applied it in the field to evaluate cross-domain variations between different cities of scale. I owe a great deal of gratitude for designing this research and look forward to continuing this method in a variety of different applications related to the mission to provide educational content. This is not a Philosophy 101 course, which introduces historical and modern words for you to memorize, rather, this course places us at the center of intellectual discourse and allows us to simplify the journey of knowledge in the upcoming lessons. Previewing some of the research topics we will cover further include the following:

• 💡 Learn Systemic Design - Systemic Design is an integrative discipline that utilizes systems thinking and varied design practices to understand subject-object relationships experienced in everyday life. We can understand Systemic Design simply by demonstrating the way individuals, governments, and organizations like corporations impact related systems that affect our community such as; the Florida water systems, sugar and farming runoff, political lobbying, and the ecological disaster of red tide.  
• 🧿 Develop Critical Consciousness - Critical consciousness describes a social process of attaining an in-depth understanding of the world by decoding social and political contradictions to overcome their unjust oppressive effects. Coined by Paulo Freire in his highly influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that will have an entire module dedicated to in a future module.
• 😜 Teach Community Life Skills - Based on the Critical Pedagogy method elucidated by Freire, a major theme of the SolarPunk Sangha is to provide a cooperative working strategy and tactics for group workshops. Part of that skillset includes basic pedagogical literacy in order to manage a community of learners in your local area.
• 🧘 Foster Integrity & Growth - As this module progresses, there is an intended deepening of awareness of each philosophical field as it relates back to personal experience. This is to encourage learning outcomes that allow us to make wise judgements, create quality things, serve community, and more.  

The flexibility of the Circles method allows us to reach across domains to provide insights to political, economic, and ecological areas of interest. Gaining this form of literacy, to be able to see the interconnected social interactions, are basic skills we will develop over the course of this Exploration. In the next lesson, I will provide designs and resources that can be utilized in daily activities and content consumption. 

🪸 Rhizome

Rhizomes are the syllabus components for each Exploration course based on global initiatives produced by global institutions including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights  (UDHR), U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and the American Green New Deal (GND). In addition to these global initiatives, a localized research method will be developed over the course of the first two modules featuring the Circles method, Life Course Cube, and the Venus Project. The concept of rhizomatic learning does lend from Deleuze and Guattari, which we will detail further in the respective lesson. A variety of critical life system approaches are necessary to included in our decision making framework to compile programs of community management compatible with pre-existing programs.

One of the tasks envisioned is to build an alternative curriculum through the domains of Sustainability. This venture reviews research-based institutions such as universities and higher education by seeking to improve access to quality education in a highly politicized educational system, such as my home state of Florida. In our pursuit to build educational content through Exploration Courses, this particular syllabus is designed for educators on how to apply this framework to an online learning management system commonly used by universities and more recently public K-12 systems. If you want to learn how to build a school from the ground up, this Exploration serves as a catalog of insights, designs, and resources based on the interpretation of the philosophy of Critical Sustainability. 

🚧 Projects

The first project planned for this Exploration is really simple, build a digital journal that syncs with the content we publish here. This is an introduction to designing our own applications and standard models to follow for learning user experience, systemic design, and other product related fields. This project is optional and aims to introduce applications which simplify my workflow while are free (or freemium), capable of being copied, and easy to learn for long term use. 

Later tentative projects from the Sangha will also include a template of this website and learning management system that can be purchased through our website tool, Webflow. Although this is not a course for web design, it is very interesting to point out the overlap between user experience, philosophy, design, and connecting it to mindfulness. Offering a structured template based on our curriculum (based on Critical Sustainability) opens the door to other online schools which is welcomed for potential educators who want to build a platform on limited resources.

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📜 Recommended Media

A quick note on the design of the website and connected media for each course. At the top of each lesson will have a featured media section on what is being referenced, where you can buy or read free, and a Wikipedia link if available. In this opening lesson, we are only highlighting Paul James work, but will have a dedicated lesson in the upcoming module.

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