Within a world of multiple crisis and uncertainties, present critiques of modern institutions like the school and the university question inherent epistemes of education, still belonging to an ‘industrial age’. Claiming to move ‘beyond’ such dysfunctional rationalities (Ball & Collet-Sabé 2021), Commoning is regarded as a potential toward organizational democratization (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022:12). Commoning refers to a threefold notion of (organizational) democracy. Adressing social togetherness, peer governance and care-economy, it refers to an onto-epistemological potential, which may support transforming our given institutions (like schools, universities and others) towards the Common Good. With it´s alternative imaginary of alternative patterns of organizing, Commoning and Commoning Education suspends, neutralizes and inverts the given onto-epistemology. Suggested by the commoning activists Helfrich and Bollier (2020), this potentials of “co-producing and commoning a different episteme” (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022) for organizational education materializes and methodizes in the Pattern Language of Commoning (PLC), developed by Silke Helfrich. Based on the experiences of more than 400 interviewees from social movement organizations, the PLC card deck condenses into 33 patterns, which each include illustrations, problem questions, short descriptions, examples, and connection patterns. Patterns in general can be understood as a tool that promote life and a free, fair, and sustainable world. Containing proven experiential knowledge, patterns describe the essence of successful solutions to problems that may occur in comparable contexts. The complex interplay between context, problem, and solution is critical; thus, these three elements are never isolated from each other (Helfrich & Bollier 2020). Offering a new frame of reference “among people and between people and the world” (Helfrich & Bollier, 2020, 78), the PLC has been created in order to facilitate patterns of problem solving (cf. Leitner 2015, 33) to promote ethical and process- and relationship-oriented attitudes and stances (cf. Helfrich & Petzold 2021). Suggesting a “best practice” to use, the patterns have a hypothetical character (cf. Alexander & Ishikawa et al 1995). From an organizational education perspective, the PLC may contribute to the learning in, of, and between organizations (cf. Göhlich et al 2018; Weber 2020). In which ways does PLC in the practice of PLC card deck users contribute to ‘re-inventing’ existing organizations (Laloux 2015)? In order to learn more about the empirical use of this new praxis of organizing, the paper will present the empirical findings of an online survey realized with card deck users of the PLC in the german speaking world.

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