Learning for Life Symposium
On 4 April 2024, the TU Delft Extension School for Continuing Education celebrates 10 years since its foundation. A decade dedicated to furthering the University’s commitment to the provision of post-initial education in science, design, and engineering to interested learners and working professionals worldwide. It is an exciting time to reflect on what Learning for Life means now and in the future.
This page provides supporting information for my keynote contribution to the symposium.
On 4 April 2024, the TU Delft Extension School for Continuing Education celebrates 10 years since its foundation. A decade dedicated to furthering the University’s commitment to the provision of post-initial education in science, design, and engineering to interested learners and working professionals worldwide. It is an exciting time to reflect on what Learning for Life means now and in the future.
This page provides supporting information for my keynote contribution to the symposium.
POWER POINT SLIDES
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Narrative to accompany slides
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Learning for a Complex World: A Lifewide concept of learning, development and education
Open access book https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-for-a-complex-world.html |
A lifewide ecological concept for lifelong learning
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Learning for Our Life and a More Sustainable Future
Norman Jackson
Learning in order to live a certain sort of life: Learning, connected to doing and reflecting on the effects and consequences of what we have done, is an essential aspect of our competence as an organism to interact effectively with our environment in order to live(1). Through living we learn: by learning we are able to live a particular sort of life for example, the life of a scientist, engineer or medical practitioner. Understanding competence for living a particular life draws attention to the fundamentally ecological nature of our existence, in the sense that we enact life within and with a particular world of meanings, relationships, connectivities, interactions, interdependencies, emergence and transformations – including our own transformation as a human being. Fundamentally, we are interbeings(2) interacting with an ecological world(3).
Learning to live our life now and for our own future: During our life, we integrate our living and learning continuously and seamlessly through thousands of days of living. Perhaps we take for granted that who we are and who we are becoming is the result of living in the multitude of ‘lifewide’ environments we inhabit everyday(4), providing different contexts, situations and affordances – including opportunities, problems and challenges. We engage in different activities for different purposes, have different relationships and interact with different people and things in our environment in order to experience and achieve. As we interact purposefully with our world, we weave together aspects of ourselves and our environment, in an ecology of practice in which learning, being and the making of meaning and other achievements, emerge(5). Accepting that living, learning and practice are ecological phenomenon is an important educational step towards an ecological world view(6) that is essential for living for distant sustainable futures(5).
Through our diverse lifewide activities and experiences we try to satisfy our psychological, physical, material and social needs and be and become the person we want to be. If our ambition is to be and become an engineer, scientist or clinician then we submit to a protracted period of academic study and professional development which might be the dominant activity in our life. Universities are effective at supporting this need. But we achieve this transformation to the person we want to be in the contexts of all the other parts of our life. Living and learning is a whole of life, whole person experience and this requires a holistic concept of lifelong-lifewide learning and self-education. Universities can do more to support this enterprise.
Learning to live for a more distant and uncertain future that is not ours: Perhaps we need to be reminded at this point in human history that the core purpose of learning as a species is to understand ‘how to live and be on this tiny planet’(7). We have now reached a tipping point in which our past and current behaviors as a species has upset the delicate balance of a fragile world and we are likely to bring about our own demise unless we significantly change our behaviour(8). Optimistically, we might represent this moment as a turning point, at which we begin to cultivate the need to live and learn in ways that not only help us live our life now, but are also more likely to contribute to the wellbeing of a world beyond our own existence. The job of humanity now is to chart a course and begin the journey towards what might be termed, an ecological civilisation(9) founded on the principles that all life depends. This is both the challenge and opportunity for education to prepare and help people learn and develop for a life that not only meets their own needs, and the needs of the economy and society, but also meets the needs of a more distant sustainable future(7).
Lifelong-lifewide learning ecosystems for a more sustainable future: The ecological world view I am advocating, encourages us to think about the ecosystems we inhabit in order to live a particular sort of life. Natural ecosystems emerge when a particular environment is conducive to certain forms of life which, over time, inhabit, adapt to and help co-create. Human-made ecosystems, like an education system, are designed, constructed, resourced and animated to achieve certain purposes and outcomes. Our education systems were designed for an industrial age and they are trying to adapt to the rapidly evolving post-industrial age. But the real challenge for all educational systems and institutions within them, is to help co-create new lifelong learning ecosystems(10) whose purpose is to serve more distant futures, as well as the needs of the present. Such ecosystems will be embedded in communities and or enterprises that are trying to live in more sustainable ways and or transition to a more sustainable future.
Sources
1 White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: the concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66, 279–333.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing
3 Barnett, R. and Jackson, N.J. (Eds) (2020) Ecologies for Learning and Practice: Emerging ideas, sightings and possibilities. Routledge
4 Jackson, N. J. (2011) The lifelong and lifewide dimensions of living, learning and developing. In N J Jackson (Ed) Learning for a Complex World: A Lifewide Concept of Learning, Education and Personal Development. Bloomington: Authorhouse. p.1-21 Availabe at: https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-for-a-complex-world.html checked 26/01/24
5 Jackson, N.J. (2022) Steps To An Ecology of Lifelong-Lifewide Learning for Sustainable, Regenerative Futures In K. Evans, Lee, W.O. Markowitsch, J. & Zukas M. (Eds) Third International Handbook of Lifelong Learning Springer Available at https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-67930-9_15-
6 Kambo, A. Drogemuller, R., & Yarlagadda, P. (2016) Ecological worldview and regenerative sustainability paradigm. International Journal of Advances in Science, Engineering and Technology (IJASEAT), 4(2 (Special Issue 3), pp. 34-39. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/221645/ checked 26/01/24
7 Barnett, R. (2022) The End of Learning: Living a Life in a World in Motion In K. Evans, Lee, W.O. Markowitsch, J. & Zukas M. (Eds) Third International Handbook of Lifelong Learning Springer
8 Rockström, J. & Gaffney, O (2021) Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet. DK
9 Lent, J. (2021). What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like? YES Magazine Spring 2021 Available at: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/ecological-civilization/2021/02/16/what-does-ecological-civilization-look-like checked 26/01/24
10 Spencer-Keyse, J., Luksha, P., and Cubista, J. (2020) Learning Ecosystems: An Emerging Praxis For The Future Of Education Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO & Global Education Futures, Availabe at: https://learningecosystems2020.globaledufutures.org/ checked 26/01/24