Reflection as Regeneration: Toward a Living Education

By Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius

In an age of systemic uncertainty, education is increasingly called upon to be more than a vessel for information. Learners arrive not just with gaps in knowledge but with fractured attention, frayed belonging, and deep questions about meaning—a reality reflected in global studies showing declines in student well-being, attention, and engagement (OECD, 2023; UNESCO, 2022). Yet much of education continues to be organized around performance, compliance, and control.

We speak of transformation—but plan for standardization.
We teach content—but forget to till the soil of context.
We pursue outcomes—but neglect the conditions that make real learning possible.

What if the way forward is not faster or newer, but deeper and more alive? Regenerative education is precisely that—an approach that understands learning as a living system, capable of renewal when its inner conditions are cared for. It invites us to shift from seeing schools as factories for outcomes to ecosystems of growth. At its heart lies reflective practice, not simply as a professional tool, but as a way to stay attuned, to course-correct, and to cultivate the conditions in which education—and those within it—can thrive.

Regeneration as a Life-Centric Principle

In biological systems, regeneration is the process through which life re-creates itself repairing, restoring, or re-patterning in response to disruption. It is not about returning to what was, but evolving in ways that remain aligned with the integrity of the whole (Tanaka & Reddien, 2011).

Daniel Christian Wahl (2016) reminds us that regeneration is not just a biologica mechanism—it is a principle for design, learning, and culture. To design regeneratively is to ask: What are the conditions that allow life to thrive here?

In education, the same question applies. I remember a moment in a classroom when a student, after weeks of struggle, said, “I finally stopped trying to get it right—and started to notice what was already growing.” That is regeneration in practice: life reorganizing itself toward vitality.

A regenerative learning environment does not impose learning—it hosts it. It is not built on control, but on deep understanding of context, relationship, and readiness. It honors complexity rather than seeking to reduce it. And it moves not in straight lines, but in spirals—looping back, iterating, and evolving.

In the same way that ecosystems heal through interdependence, educational systems regenerate when reflection, relationship, and purpose are interwoven. This resonates with Argyris and Schön’s (1978) notion of double-loop learning, where systems learn not only to correct errors but to question the assumptions that created them. Reflection thus becomes the medium through which learning systems remain alive to themselves.

Reflection as a Living Practice

Reflective practice, when embraced in this spirit, becomes a regenerative force—not a technical mechanism for improving delivery, but a way of staying present, responsive, and ethically grounded amid change.

Donald Schön (1983) described reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action as the artistry that allows professionals to improvise and learn within uncertainty. Building on this, Farrell (2018) identifies reflection as a multi-dimensional process—technical, deliberative, and critical—each deepening the practitioner’s capacity to connect thinking and doing.

Carol Sanford (2017) takes the idea further, distinguishing between extractive, sustaining, and regenerative modes of learning. Only the latter, she argues, cultivates the full potential of living systems—not by fixing learners, but by engaging them as co-creators of their development.

Reflective educators ask different questions.
Not “What worked?” but “What wants to happen next?”
Not “How do I fix this?” but “What am I not yet seeing?”

These questions are not formulas—they are invitations. They symbolize a shift in stance: from control to curiosity, from efficiency to empathy. Over time, such reframing cultivates cultures where learning is not managed but made possible.

I often notice this shift in seminars—when silence stretches just long enough for something real to surface. A student or colleague speaks not from duty but from discovery. That moment, small as it is, signals the pulse of regeneration: awareness becoming aliveness.

In this way, reflective practice helps educators and institutions move from command- and-control to care-and-cultivate—aligning their practice with the rhythm of living systems rather than the mechanics of performance.

Cultivating the Conditions for Learning

In regenerative agriculture, the farmer does not grow the plant—they tend the soil. Likewise, in education, the teacher does not impose learning—they help cultivate the conditions in which it can take root. There is no single set of conditions—only patterns that support growth in context.

Smith and Sobel (2010) show how place-based education fosters this by rooting learning in lived experience, ecology, and community. Reflection amplifies this process by enabling adaptation: it allows curriculum to breathe, lessons to evolve, and teachers to notice what the moment truly calls for.

As an exmaple at the education I have bee part of - like Kaospilot in Denmark, and Elisava in Spain - reflection often occurs not at the end of a project but at its midpoint, when uncertainty is most alive. Students pause to sense what the process itself is teaching them. Sometimes the most revealing moments happen not during presentations but over coffee breaks, when a quiet comment reframes the whole inquiry. They are not merely performing learning; they are metabolizing experience.

Similarly, van Zyl (2023) demonstrates that students who engage in reflective goal-setting show increased well-being and resilience. They learn not only how to achieve, but how to adjust. They learn how to learn. And they learn how to live.

(I have often seen that genuine reflection arises less from structured protocols than from shared pauses—moments when learning reveals its own rhythm.)

Schools as Living Systems

At the organizational level, regenerative schools function less like machines and more like ecosystems. They listen to feedback. They adjust their rhythms. They honor cycles of rest and renewal.

Peter Senge (2006) defined such schools as learning organizations—places where people continually expand their capacity to create desired futures. But that capacity depends on deep, embedded reflection—at every level: individual, interpersonal, institutional.

Systemic reflection refers to the capacity of an educational ecosystem to examine and adjust its own underlying assumptions and practices—turning reflection from an individual act into a collective, structural capability. When reflection becomes systemic, schools shift from being instruments of transmission to organisms of transformation.

Macintyre, de Souza, and Wals (2023) describe how regenerative education movements in Latin America incorporate dialogue, co-design, and cultural decolonization as systemic practices of reflection and renewal. These are not soft add-ons—they are foundational redesigns. They illustrate that regeneration begins not in the curriculum but in the consciousness of the system itself.

And perhaps that is the quietest revolution of all: when schools begin to see themselves as living entities with the right—and the responsibility—to evolve.

From Technical Improvement to Systemic Flourishing

Reflection has long been framed as a tool for teachers. But what if we saw it instead as a principle of system care?

What if reflection is how an educational system breathes?
How it remembers what it values?
How it heals when it frays?

Jay and Johnson (2002) argue that reflective practice evolves from surface-level description to critical engagement with complexity. Ma and Ismail’s (2025) bibliometric review shows an exponential rise in reflective education research particularly linked to post-pandemic, digital, and equity-focused innovation. This signals a broader cultural pivot—from reflection as remediation to reflection as regeneration.

This growing body of scholarship suggests that education itself is searching for new metaphors—not of control, but of care; not of efficiency, but of ecology. Reflection becomes the pulse of renewal that keeps the system responsive and alive.

Conclusion: A Future Worth Preparing For

To regenerate is not to revert—it is to renew; to respond to what is broken with deeper wholeness. Reflection allows us to do this, not just personally but collectively.

It helps education remain alive to itself.
It helps teachers teach not from habit, but from presence.
It helps students grow not just in knowledge, but in awareness, responsibility, and relation.

We speak of transformation—but plan for standardization. Reflection as regeneration invites us instead to plan for life—to design for renewal, relationship, and responsiveness.

This article does not offer a manual for doing so; its purpose is to reframe the question of how we think about learning itself. The practical pathways—pedagogical, institutional, and policy-based—are explored in the companion pieces Reflection as Infrastructure and Reflection as Renewal. It tells us: what you pay attention to, you water. What you reflect on, you renew. And what you renew—renews you.

References

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley.

Farrell, T. S. C. (2018). Reflective practice for language teachers: From research to practice. Bloomsbury Academic.

Jay, J. K., & Johnson, K. L. (2002). Capturing complexity: A typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(1), 73–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(01)00051-8

Macintyre, T., de Souza, D. T., & Wals, A. E. J. (2023). A regenerative decolonization perspective on education for sustainable development (ESD) from Latin America. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Ma, H., & Ismail, L. (2025). Bibliometric analysis and systematic review of digital competence in education. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 185. OECD. (2023). Education at a glance 2023: OECD indicators. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/69096873-en

Sanford, C. (2017). The regenerative business: Redesign work, cultivate human potential, achieve extraordinary outcomes. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.

Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.

Smith, G. A., & Sobel, D. (2010). Place- and community-based education in schools. Routledge.

Tanaka, E. M., & Reddien, P. W. (2011). The cellular basis for animal regeneration. Developmental Cell, 21(1), 172–185.

UNESCO. (2022). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. Paris: UNESCO.

van Zyl, L. (2023). Reflective goal setting and first-year student well-being: A randomized control study. Journal of College Student Development, 64(1), 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2023.0003

Wahl, D. C. (2016). Designing regenerative cultures. Triarchy Press.

About Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius

Academic Advisor – Professor & Strategy / Design Leader
As a principal of a private university for 17 years, Christer has seen both the immense value of deep reflective practice and how challenging it is to weave it into curricula. He joined Rflect because it provides a unique opportunity to solve that challenge and scale reflective practice to unlock human flourishing.

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