The future you were promised, it’s not happening, that future is gone.
Virginie Servant-Miklos, Pedagogies of Collapse
When we read Pedagogies of Collapse, we did not recognize an ancestor. We recognized a fellow traveler — someone who set out from a different trailhead and walked into a clearing we already knew.
Virginie Servant-Miklos is a historian of problem-based learning and a climate educator. She built her framework, Experimental Pedagogics (XP), for university students staring down ecological and social collapse. We build ours for Autistic and Disabled learners staring down an education system that was never designed for them. Different rooms. Different emergencies. The same refusal.
She refuses to teach as though history has ended. We refuse to teach as though there is one normal mind to teach toward. And when we lay her framework beside ARLES and the Learning Space, the shapes line up.
This is a crosswalk of convergence, not lineage. It converges toward us at the architecture, at the emotional core, and at the diagnosis. It stops short of us at one layer — the layer where the learner holds design power over the room.
Two concentric circles
XP is built as five nested dimensions, drawn — in Servant-Miklos’s own image — like a Russian doll. They run from the closest thing to us outward to the furthest: the cognitive, the individual, the group, the societal, the global. The brain at the center. The collapsing planet at the rim.
ARLES runs the same direction. Attention at the center. Systems at the rim. Five rings, nearest to furthest.
We did not coordinate this. Two people, working different emergencies, reached for the same shape — because learning is not flat. It is not a transaction between a curriculum and a brain. It nests. What happens in the room is held inside what happens in the body, which is held inside the group, which is held inside the system. Any pedagogy that forgets this is shouting abstract formulas over the sound of mortar fire.
| Experimental Pedagogics (inner → outer) | Nearest ARLES ring |
|---|---|
| Cognitive — cognitive architecture, motivation, problem-based learning | Attention |
| Individual — the body as the start of experience | Regulation + Lived Experience |
| Group — designing for messy human emotion | Relational / Regulation |
| Societal — education for social change | Systems |
| Global — collapse as the defining planetary condition | Systems |
| (no XP equivalent) | Environment |
Look at the last row. One ARLES ring has no twin in XP. Hold that thought — it is the most useful thing in this crosswalk, and we return to it at the end.
Broken systems, not broken people
This is our oldest stance. Servant-Miklos writes it in a different vocabulary, but she writes it.
Her diagnosis: the education system exists to manufacture interchangeable, standardized units of labor for a market that needs them isolated and alike. Meritocracy is the ideology that makes this feel fair — it credits success to individual effort and blames failure on individual deficiency, while waving away the structural barriers of class, race, gender, and disability. She names disability in that list.
And when her students freeze, flee, or fight in the face of what they are learning, she refuses to read it as bad behavior. She will not penalize a student frozen in shock for failing to hand in coursework, because freezing is a legitimate response to having the rug pulled out from under your life. The fault, she says, is not in the kids.
That is counter-deficit reasoning. That is locating the breakage in the system and the appropriateness in the person. We have been saying it about Autistic and Disabled learners for years. The meltdown is not the malfunction. The environment is.
| Pedagogies of Collapse | Stimpunks |
|---|---|
| Education manufactures interchangeable, standardized labor | School as a factory built to process the standard student |
| Meritocracy hides structural barriers — class, race, gender, disability | The pathology paradigm locates fault in the person, not the system |
| Fight, flight, and freeze are legitimate responses, not misbehavior | Behavior is communication; the meltdown is not the malfunction |
| Students respond more soundly to collapse than the adults around them | Broken systems, not broken people |
Regulation is the curriculum
XP’s two innermost human rings — the individual and the group — are about emotion and the body. Servant-Miklos draws on existential phenomenology to insist the body is the starting point of experience, and on psychoanalytic group theory to design for the messy emotional reality of working together. She catalogs the trauma reflexes that walk into her classroom — fight, flight, freeze — and treats regulating them as part of teaching, not a distraction from it.
We would put it plainly. Regulation is the curriculum. You cannot learn from a state of threat. Before attention, before content, comes the nervous system.
Where she reaches for psychoanalysis and phenomenology, we reach for monotropism, interoception, and the double empathy problem — the recognition that miscommunication across neurotypes runs both ways, and repair is a shared obligation. Different theories. The same conviction: the emotional life of the learner is not the weather around the lesson. It is the ground the lesson grows in.
| Pedagogies of Collapse | Stimpunks |
|---|---|
| The body is the starting point of experience | Interoception and embodiment come before cognition |
| Fight, flight, and freeze named and worked with in class | Regulation before attention; no learning under threat |
| Group dynamics designed for, not assumed away | The double empathy problem — repair runs both ways |
| Self-Determination Theory: autonomy, competence, relatedness | Self-determination, agency, and belonging as access needs |
Imperfect solidarities, sustainable care
Servant-Miklos’s core ethical concept is imperfect solidarity: the messy, committed, long-haul work of standing with people you do not perfectly agree with, against a problem too big for purity. It refuses both the martyr and the spectator.
And she follows it to a conclusion that belongs over every staff-room door. Self-abnegation is not virtue. The teacher who gives until there is nothing left is not noble — they are feeding the very system that is collapsing them. Self-love, boundaries, and the loud no are structural acts, not selfishness.
This is mutual aid by another name. It is why we have a Nap Director. It is why rest is policy and not reward. It is why we treat the sustainability of the carer as a condition of the care. Imperfect solidarity is the honest version of community — not a frictionless utopia, but people choosing each other again and again, on terms that let them survive the choosing.
| Pedagogies of Collapse | Stimpunks |
|---|---|
| Imperfect solidarities — committed, messy, anti-purity | Mutual aid — solidarity, not charity |
| Self-abnegation feeds the collapsing system | Rest is resistance; the carer’s sustainability is part of the care |
| The loud no and the boundary as structural acts | Access needs and boundaries are not extras; they are the work |
| Long-term commitment over fleeting engagement | Community as choosing each other, again and again |
The ring with no twin: Environment
Here is where the circles stop lining up. And the gap is the most useful thing in this crosswalk.
XP runs cognitive → individual → group → societal → global. Trace the path. It moves from the brain, through the person, through the group — and then jumps straight to society and the planet. Somewhere in that jump, a layer goes missing. The one between the group and the world. The room. The actual, physical, sensory environment the learner is sitting inside.
XP has an outer environment — the collapsing biosphere — but no inner one. It names the planet that is failing the learner and never names the lighting, the noise, the seating, the sensory load of the space the learner is failing to cope inside. It centers emotion and trauma with real care, then offers reflective practice as the intervention: talk, project, group. What it does not offer is design power over the space itself.
ARLES puts a whole ring there: Environment. It is where Cavendish Space lives — caves, campfires, watering holes, the library, the habitat — and where niche construction and toolbelt theory hand the learner the right to shape their own conditions. Not to cope better with a fixed room. To change the room.
This is the productive extension Stimpunks offers XP. The fight, flight, and freeze Servant-Miklos catalogs are real — and for Autistic and Disabled learners, they are not only the new trauma of collapse. They are the daily weather of environments built for a body that is not theirs. You can do all the reflective practice in the world. If the fluorescent lights stay on and the learner has no power to turn them off, regulation will not hold. The nervous system answers to the environment, not the syllabus.
And there is one more seam. XP’s innermost ring, the cognitive, is built on the human cognitive architecture — a single, shared blueprint of how minds process knowledge. We start one assumption earlier. There is no the human cognitive architecture. Monotropism is not a deviation from a standard attention. It is a different attention. The crosswalk holds right up to the center — and at the very center, we ask the question XP does not: whose mind is the model built for?
| XP stops at | Stimpunks extends to |
|---|---|
| A collapsing global environment at the outer rim | A designed, immediate environment the learner can shape — Cavendish Space, niche construction |
| Reflective practice as the response to dysregulation | Environmental design as the response — change the room, not just the coping |
| Fight, flight, freeze as collapse-trauma | Fight, flight, freeze as the daily weather of hostile environments |
| One human cognitive architecture | Many minds; monotropism is difference, not deficit |
Read
Read Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It by Virginie Servant-Miklos (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). It is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence — free to read and share.
Two circles, drawn from different emergencies, nearly the same. The ring she left out is the one where the learner holds the pen.
