What is to come in this book

the individuals and groups within it, much less action has been taken to reduce inequalities and address the underlying structural issues that create imbalance. That imbalance is everywhere: pollution is an imbalance between dirty air and the ability of nature to process it. Unemployment is an imbalance between those in work and those who are left out. Poverty is an imbalance between those who accumulate material wealth at the expense of others and those who suffer as a result. These are just a few examples; there are many others. Inequality is imbalance. Social injustice is imbalance. Our world, our system – ecological and social – is out of balance and unhealthy. So, how do we co-create a balance ‘wholistically’? How do we become whole?

As we have argued earlier, each theme we have presented in this chapter has within it elements of the others because they are all interconnected, as we are all interconnected. Together they are essential for collective health and well-being, emotionally, psychologically, materially and spiritually. Thus ‘the whole of which comes forth within all of its parts and the parts find their significance and identity in belonging to the whole’ (Wahl, 2016: 93). In the following chapters we dive deeper into participatory practice as community-based action for the transformative change which we believe is possible to co-create.

What is to come in this book

The ideas in this book are complex. This stems in part from the interconnections between the elements and themes we have introduced you to in this chapter and which we will examine in greater depth in the chapters to come. But it is also complex because we are using linear text to describe an experiential phenomenon that stems from a way of thinking about wholeness. At the beginning of this chapter, we used the metaphor of the garden. But as you continue to read this book, we want you to think also about a tapestry. Tapestry has been made for thousands of years. It is a piece of work that involves a warp and weft being woven together to form a pattern. The strands highlighted in this chapter are woven into the chapters that follow and only when you have read the whole will you see the pattern in all its glory.

The book comes in two parts. In the first part of the book, we look at the bigger picture. After introducing you to the ideas that are woven into the book, in Chapter 2 we start by taking a critical look, using the UK as a case study, at a world that has been created as the result of a focus on individualism and in which the common or collective has been diminished through the effects of neoliberalism and ‘austerity’. We demonstrate how these current challenges are rooted in a narrative that has created an unjust and ecologically devastated world.

In Chapter 3 we explore the alternative, participatory consciousness in an ecological context, as a different narrative and worldview, revisiting the ancient wisdom still conserved by many indigenous populations and integrating it with alternative views of science and society. In Chapter 4 we explore current approaches to participatory practice and how they have evolved over the last ten

to twenty years. In doing so, we highlight the challenges the many initiatives have faced working against the backdrop of a non-participatory world and the issues raised in Chapter 2.

In the second part of the book, we start to dig deeper into what participatory practice actually entails. In Chapter 5 we explore the use of story, both at a metalevel, in terms of the hegemonic narrative that has been promulgated over the last 50 years, and at the local level, looking at the power of story as a way to unlock people’s imagination and help them to explore their own experience. In Chapter 6 we dive deep into the process of dialogue that follows the telling of stories. This is a process of knowledge creation as people start to co-create meaning together. This process can raise emotional responses and also conflict, but both are integral to the process of transformation. In Chapter 7 we unpick the role of critical reflection in teaching to question, furthering the process of raising awareness and conscientisation. In Chapter 8 we unpick what transformation means and looks like as the result of these participatory practices. Finally, in Chapter 9 we look to the future and how we can co-create hope, wholeness and a practical utopia through connecting on a wider scale beyond the local to the global.

Throughout the book, as we take you on this journey into participatory practice, we will provide you with some examples from the literature and from our own practice. Each chapter has been written by one of us and so your guide at different stages of the journey will vary.3 The final destination is up to you, but our aim is to lead you to what Macy and Johnstone (2012) call ‘Active Hope’.

Peter McLaren, in a discussion of disutopia, states that ‘our internal and external worlds seem to have been split apart’, a disconnection he links to the process of disutopia as ‘not just the temporary absence of Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of social dreams’ (Dinerstein and Leary, cited in McLaren, 2000: xxv). We want to offer you an insight into a participatory approach to practice that restores hope from hopelessness, connects the unhappy times that we live in to the fractured state of our external world, and situates critical agency as a form of autonomous being in the world that leads to action for transformation. Think of it as a practical utopia: a way of shaping a better world impassioned by outrage over the injustices that we have created in the present. This releases the energy of possibility. From our disenchantment with what is, we become enchanted with what might be.

Participatory practice is the future without which there will be no future. It means not paying lip-service to participation but a total regenerative transformation underpinned by the values of love.