About — Unfolding Aliveness

Unfolding Aliveness is an educational-ecological-artistic-space, studio, and practice which attends to and creates with multispecies world/s.

Founded by Matthew Bejtlich and Charlotte Hankin, it is our response to an increasingly ravaged planet, one marked by the epoch ‘Anthropocene’; a planetary boundary marked by human in/action. Charlotte and Matthew feel concern for the future/s of all life on this planet and seek out hope-full, generative and imaginative responses to attend-to, heal, provoke, agitate, conjure up alternative ways of living (and dying) together.

Unfolding Aliveness is a space for like-minded people to come together, to share stories, create art, listen, learn, and give back through varied expressions of communion with others. Together, we might inspire new ways of noticing our strange, mysterious and beautiful world/s and write new narratives that are co-authored by many and not just the few.

Email

matt@unfoldingaliveness.com
charlotte@unfoldingaliveness.com

Matthew Bejtlich is a systemic designer, data scientist, educator, and artist creating emergent and transformative learning experiences. Through a playful approach, he is interested in co-crafting tools, resources, rituals, and stories that inspire dialogue and collaboration within a place, deepening multispecies relationships. He is particularily curious in exploring artistic, sensorial, and embodied practices to help activate the latent potential of a place and its web of life.

Matt is passionate about creating spaces for improvization, exchange, and reflection to emerge, with a particular emphasis on elevating voices and perspectives often unheard. In doing so, he seeks to weave relationships between humans, more-than-human life, and place to nurture more caring, inclusive, and regenerative communities.

He is currently a part-time professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he teaches courses in data science, systemic design, and mapping in the Landscape Architecture program, and at Northeastern University, where he teaches in information design and interactive data visualization. Matthew is a researcher at the Community Noise Lab at the School of Public Health at Brown University, Department of Environmental Epidemiology. On the side, he also mentors high school students in sustainability and storytelling in project based learning through the online platform called Polygence.

Charlotte Hankin is an international educator with twenty two years’ experience in a variety of roles including teacher, leader, school-to-school consultant and education policy advisor for the UK government, working in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Bali. Charlotte has dedicated her professional life to championing the lives of children and the natural world, deepening knowledge, wisdom and finesse in curricula design, professional development, sustainability for education, and creative and critical dispositions for learning.

Charlotte is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Education, University of Bath working at the nexus of theory and practice. Her doctoral inquiry explores animal-child relations to consider how international schools might shift from human-exceptionalism to more regenerative pedagogical practices. Charlotte employs posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories and practices to co-create playful, arts-based research with animals and children.

In an increasingly fragile and precarious world, Charlotte believes that educational ecosystems could design more learning experiences that help us all to notice and attend to the living and non-living contributions to the world around us. Exploring and expressing the complex relationships in our world with creativity and sensitivity helps us all to develop care, responsibility and hope for more generative, flourishing futures.