About EE
Dr. Alicia Flynn is the founder, Coordinator and Lead Facilitator of Ecocentres Everywhere.
Alicia is pictured here in Toolangi State Forest in awe of the great Mountain Ash ~ the world’s tallest flowering trees.
Photo by Lynnelle Moran.
Ecocentres Everywhere is for the community, formed through a community of practice.
Ecocentres Everywhere emerged from the idea that it’s possible to create little centres of thriving ecologies everywhere. Every school, every early learning centre, and every place of learning and working could become a flourishing ecosystem through thoughtful design.
These times are showing us we need to rethink how we live and learn on our home planet Earth. While the formal school curriculum provides little detail or direction for ecological design thinking, or climate and environmental education, we are in great need of connective, ecological thinking to revitalise our places of learning and our broader biodiverse communities.
The way to do this is not through fear but through affirmative relational, reciprocal and regenerative ways.
Ecological thinking is based on ecosystems science that shows how life on Earth emerged through relationships of symbiosis, and the arts of paying attention to our geocultural places through cultivating more caring relationships with the land and waterways.
This includes Indigenous science, philosophy, and land practices that have continuously designed human systems according to a balance of human participation within more-than-human ecosystems, living in honour of the sacred Land.
Dr. Alicia Flynn founded Ecocentres Everywhere based on a lifetime dedicated to learning from, in and with the land. Alicia has always worked within a community of practice with many wonderful educators, facilitators, researchers, campaigners, and Elders.
In 2020, the Common Worlds Research Collective made the call that “It is time to step up to the challenge and fundamentally reconfigure the role of education and schooling in order to radically reimagine and relearn our place and agency in the world”. Ecocentres Everywhere is a response to that call.
Bio: Alicia has a PhD in critical place-based environment and climate education, and is a registered teacher, with over 20 years of experience in environmental education, sustainability, place-responsive pedagogies, food gardening, strategic planning, pedagogical mentoring, and research with schools, universities, early learning centres, and community organisations.
Alicia is passionate about cultivating care-full place relations and working towards interspecies and intergenerational justice through education, research, advocacy, and community engagement.
Ecocentres Everywhere is the culmination of this dedication.