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Ecologies for connecting to our past

25/9/2017

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 I'm back in Australia to visit my mum. She lives in a lovely place on the southern New South Wales coast.  My parents have lived here for over 30 years and I have visited many times. It's the only reason I come here and it has in recent years become an annual pilgrimage (see previous October/November blogs). I know that when she is no longer here I am unlikely to come again and every time I leave I think I might never come back again.

For the past two months we have been working on the 19th issue of Lifewde Magazine in which we explore the idea of mental time travel - connecting to our memories of the past.  By coincidence I find myself writing a short article for the magazine and the fact I am here stimulates a particular stream of thoughts. 

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The enormous influence of our past

We are who we are because of our past and our present is influenced by all the things we have learnt and experienced and draw from in our present.  Our experiences and associated memories are distributed across all the different parts of our lives – the lifewide dimension, and they accumulate throughout our life – the lifelong dimension. And assuming that our memory is not impaired, we can access our past anytime and anywhere. Our ability to connect to our past and the events and people in it, is one of the things that makes us human and the particular events and people we connect to in the different parts of our lives is what makes us the particular person we are.
 
What triggers a memory?

Memories can enter our consciousness in a spontaneous way but they are often triggered or stimulated by another thought. A conversation with friend might touch on something that we can relate to and lead us to share a memory of our own experience, or we might be out walking or jogging, or driving a car and our stream of thoughts might alight on a particular memory. A piece of music might remind us of something, or an item of clothing, a child’s toy or a photograph. Particular physical spaces can also stimulate memories particularly when we enter the same environment where an experience we had formed a memory.
 It’s easy to appreciate the significance of this as I sit writing this short article on my mother’s veranda in Australia. The fact I am here reflects the fact that over 40 years ago my parents and siblings migrated to Australia and my life took a very differed direction to theirs. But I have visited them many times since then. The few weeks I spend here on the south coast of New South Wales is like a retreat and I find it an easy place to think about my past: particularly past events that happened in this space. For example, I have very vivid memories of sitting on the prickly couch grass with my wife in 1993. The adjacent photo shows the exact spot where this memory was formed. I remember we kept shifting our position to catch the late afternoon winter sun and avoid the shadows creeping towards us. I don’t remember what we talked about, probably it was about our holiday experiences and our kids, but I do remember feeling happy that I was with the person I loved. I know I paid attention to the moment as it happened because I took a photo of her which preserves an image but not the feelings. My photo is locked away in an album in my home thousands of miles away but my memory is here with me now to be re-experienced and enjoyed separately from all the other moments of my life.

How do the memories of our life connect to form us?

A few years ago I read a wonderful essay by Jay Lemke in which he posed the question How do actions or events on one time scale come to add up to more than a series of isolated happenings? (1) I am illustrating one of the answers to this question. If we have a memory of a moment and we are able retrieve it, recognize its significance and meaning, and integrate it into our present thinking in a reflective way we are bringing that transient moment into the scale of a lifetime.

The very fact I can recall the moments I describe above enables me to connect me in my present to a life that was very different to the one I now live. As I look back I can give meanings to these moments that I could not give when they happened: six years after these particular moments my wife died of breast cancer. So memories like these have a special poignancy and are to be cherished. It is undoubtedly a coincidence that I am now in this space once again and I can connect so vividly to this moment of my life 24 years ago to illustrate the point I’m making that we can use our present to connect to the moments of our life that we remember. My sense of uniqueness is reinforced by the fact that I’m pretty sure that I am the only person who has ever lived to have had this experience and my memory of it. But perhaps we should also acknowledge that many experiences are co-created, as this one was, and each of the co-creators will have a different memory of the event. When one of them dies the other loses access to all their memories and this is one of the things we miss.

Ecology of connecting to the past

We can use the learning ecology framework we are developing and testing to explain the most important features of an ecology that purposely sets out to connect us to our past and to learn from it. Figure 1 provides a generalized interpretation and the narrative below illustrates how the framework might be customized.

Figure 1 An ecology for connecting us to our past life based on the learning ecology model I am developing (2)
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There are times in our life where it is important for us to think about our past to understand ourselves better, to resolve an issue that is bothering us that originated in our past or perhaps to pass on our knowledge of our life to our children.  Five years ago, I reached a point in my life where I wanted to record the history of my family for myself, my children and, when they are old enough, my grandchildren.  My initial purpose was not to record and reflect on my own life but to record my parents lives and their reflections.

My ecology for learning emerged over a couple of years. It began with conversations with my mother and father on a visit to Australia. I recorded these and later transcribed them. I could then see that their stories of their lives could form the chapter for a book. So the idea of a book was born and it provided a context and purpose for me to think about my own story and the story of my first wife and also to find out about our ancestors. Affordance for learning was in my own life. I created a process in which I used my relationships with family members to gather their stories, photos and documents – the artefacts of our lives. I also used ancestry.com to search databases like census, and births, marriage and death certificates. These were my main resources together with my own memories. I created a space to think and write. and the act of writing was a very important part of the process for organizing and connecting my thoughts and reflecting on the life I had lived. The book was the artefact of my process.
So what is the educational value of this exploration?

The most obvious connection of using our present to explore the past is with the way we use reflection to examine our practice in order to learn how we might improve it. Many practice fields encourage or demand self-critical reflection whereby individuals are expected to reflect on a particular situation or critical incident that did not go well, to identify the reasons for what happened, and then identify lessons to inform future practice. Clearly there are parallels with the accounts in this issue but generally individuals do not create their own ecologies for deep reflection on their past: usually they engage in a formal procedure that is often linked to appraisal. Locating the process of connecting our current self to a past experience in order to demonstrate that we have learnt something useful within an accountability framework, provides a very different context for learning and personal development to what we are discussing here.

Perhaps a more useful and relevant connection is with higher education’s responsibility to develop leaners who can sustain themselves throughout long complex learning lives. This is the lifelong/lifewide learning context of an institution’s educational mission and it is the context in which the personal narratives in this magazine were created.

Higher education seems only to be mostly concerned with short time spans like the length of a module. Personal Development Planning (PDP) has encouraged longer time spans for reflection on the past and also a wider focus on experiences from different aspects of life. This is perhaps the most relevant educational context for the sorts of things we are concerned with in this issue. When I look back at my own experience as a student, of course my academic studies were important – they provided the knowledge I needed to become a geologist. But the experiences that enabled me to become the sort of geologist I wanted to be were the ones I created for myself – independent fieldwork, independent project and working in a tin mine.  These were the experiences that carried most meaning and value and these were the ones that I could draw lessons from in my future working life.

Encouraging learners to reflect on their life experiences (both academic and non-academic) and how they influence their beliefs, values and evolving identity, and facilitating and valuing this process, is an important way in which higher education can contribute to the development of learners who are resilient in the face of disruptions and setbacks, who can sustain themselves throughout the whole of their life.

Sources
1  Lemke J (2000) Across the scales of time, artefacts, activities and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind Culture and Activity 7(4) 273-290 Available at: http://dantao.weebly.com/uploads/8/5/4/9/8549343/lemke2000.pdf
2 Jackson N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Chalk Mountain: Lulu
 
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Learning Cities - urban ecosystems for lifewide/lifelong learning

12/9/2017

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This week I participated in a panel discussion at Solent University's 'Solent Exchange' conference on the theme of learning cities and learning quarters. I have to admit that although I was familiar with the idea, until a few weeks ago I knew next to nothing about them. But fear of showing such ignorance is a major incentive to learn so I set about accumulating some resources which I curated on the Lifewide Education site (1).  
​
As I discovered more I began to see how the idea of a learning city could help our education institutions address the wicked problem/challenge facing all universities and colleges today namely, 'how can we help learners develop themselves in ways that will enable them to sustain themselves through whatever the world throws at them in their complex, fast changing and sometimes disrupted working and personal lives over the next 40 or 50 years or more.  This is quite a different problem to helping learners prepare to enter the workforce with which all tertiary institutions are familiar.

We cannot sustain ourselves without learning and the will and attitudes and many other intangible qualities that enable us to keep going and keep trying and the idea of a learning city perhaps is one development in the evolution of mankind that might help more people achieve this goal and engage our educational institutions and their learners more directly and comprehensively in the learning lives of their city's inhabitants. Perhaps then higher education institutions will be able to claim that they are a public and social as well as a private benefit.


Its a fact that a majority of the world’s population lives in cities. By 2030, the proportion is likely to exceed sixty per cent and for some countries like the UK the proportion is much higher (over 90% by 2030). (2). As cities expand, municipal governments face challenges associated with social inclusion, new technologies, the knowledge economy, cultural diversity and environmental sustainability. In response, a growing number of cities are developing innovative strategies and cultures that allow, encourage and enable citizens of all ages, backgrounds and circumstances to learn throughout their life and in all aspects of their life, thereby helping to transform their city into a city that values and respects all forms of learning (formal, non-formal and informal). 

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How do Learning Quarters and Cities differ?
Southampton Solent University and Southampton City College are merging and, with the backing of of the city council, their ambition is to collaborate to form what they are calling a 'Learning Quarter'. A  number of towns and cities in the UK have established learning quarters, although often this means 'educational quarter' as the main resources for learning are established educational institutions. The term 'learning quarter' describes a specific geographic place or space within  which their is a concentration of resources and opportunities for learning and support for people wanting to learn.

The idea underlying a city learning quarter is that people come (physically or virtually) to the place to seek and find opportunities that meet their needs and interests. While a learning quarter can result in new partnerships, attract new investment and be an asset to a city,  it can also simply be a way of branding part of a city that has a concentration of educational providers: a way of making the city seem more interesting without materially affecting the life of the inhabitants of the city.  It can also propagate the idea that learning and education are the same.

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​The idea of a learning city or city of learning is a more powerful and transformative idea. It requires a richer and more inclusive concept of learning and engagement with what learning means to all inhabitants of the city in their everyday lives. The learning city  is not a designated space within the landscape but a rich, complex, dynamic city-wide ecosystem  that is open to the world and containing vast opportunities, resources and potential for enabling people, groups of people and communities, to learn and develop themselves in ways that meet their needs, interests and ambitions. In this way people can participate more fully in their own lives and in the life of the city which they inhabit and become the person they want to be and help sustain their families, communities and the city in the process. 
 
Learning city ecosystems are sites for the emergence of new culture. They are collaborative rather than competitive - they involve building partnerships and projects within which organisations, communities, networks, clubs, societies, charities and individuals can participate, learn from each other and share what they have learnt. Through new relationships, social interactions, participation and practices, over time a different culture emerges.

So how does a city become a learning city?
This is the wrong question of course. A city owes its existence and prosperity to the collective learning and enterprise of all of its inhabitants, and not just those who live their now but all the people who have ever lived in the city. Cities exist from the time that people came together to live in them because people chose to live cooperatively and to live, work and learn  together in the same space. So the idea of a learning city is a narrative of becoming, a narrative that connects all the people of the city who are learning how to become a better version of themselves so that over time the city becomes a better version of itself.
So a better question to ask is how can any city become a better version of itself as a city that supports, encourages and where appropriate enables recognition of learning and achievement? From the articles I read (2) I tried to identify some of the practices and behaviours that cities who are striving to become better versions of themselves use.

  • LEADERSHIP that is committed to achieving change over a substantial period of time. This is not a time limited project but a sustained commitment: it may take a decade to achieve a starting vision by which time the vision will have changed. Neither can leadership only be by the people who manage and control the system and its enterprises. In a city-wide ecosystem leadership needs to be distributed with activity led at all levels by all sorts of people through their own self-directed initiatives.
  • VISION - that is inclusive and grown from many points of view and that evolves over time - vision is always a work in progress and ordinary people have to see their own lives in this vision. This means that the vision must embrace an inclusive concept of learning that makes sense to everyone it is designed to serve. For me this means a lifewide and lifelong view of learning that embraces individuals' formal, non-formal and informal learning.
  • STRATEGY - that comprehensively engages with the vision, enables resources to be distributed and targeted and has space within it to enable unexpected things to emerge, for sure when these sorts of conditions are created  in a city ecosystem lots of new and exciting possibilities will emerge
  • NEW PARTNERSHIPS - city council, educational and training providers, businesses, museums, community groups, charities, clubs, anyone with an interest in helping enabling people to learn
  • ACTIVE FORUM for communication and interaction for everyone who is interested
  • PUBLIC RECOGNITION and celebration of what exists – making visible and connecting all the formal and non-formal opportunities that already exist and encouraging people and organisations to contribute
  • PLATFORM portal/website which enables people to find opportunities for learning and grow new opportunities and participation
New capacities and agency
  • BROKERS – who help connect people, communities and organisations, events, technologies and much more. They act as catalysts for new ideas & approaches and help make new things happen.
  • AMBASSADORS - who promote and encourage more and more people in the communities that make up the city to involve themselves in activities through which they can learn and develop themselves
  • MENTORS - who support and guide individuals as they develop and experience their own plans for learning and personal development
  • AGENTS - who can recognise, validate  and when appropriate provide recognition for learning and achievement
          (some cities have developed digital badge systems  eg Chicago)
  • RESEARCH – enabling the city to understand itself, capturing narratives of what it means to learn for individuals and groups (Bristol City example of ethnological research accompanying the development of the learning city) SHARING KNOWLEDGE through exhibitions, road shows, festivals, websites ++++
Celebration & renewal
  • ANNUAL LEARNING FESTIVALS & EXHIBITIONS – promotion and encouragement, opportunities for tasters to involve more people in the collective project: a tangible manifestation of the culture and ways of publicly demonstrating enduring commitment

So the idea of a learning city is a never ending story of becoming. and over time the sorts of activities and behaviours outlined above gradually influence culture so that there is a noticeable difference in the way people think and talk about their city. The old Nigerian proverb tells us that it 'takes a village to raise a child' but  as the world becomes ever more urbanised perhaps we need to adapt the wisdom in this proverb to the new reality - perhaps it takes a city and more to sustain people through the complexity, disruptions and unanticipated unfoldings of their lives in the urban world of the 21st century.

As I read more about the idea of learning cities I began to see that lifewide education and lifewide learning have an important role to play in their practical development. In turn, a city that is committed to encouraging learning in all its forms (ie formal, non-formal and informal, directed and self-directed), provides the most favourable environment within which the practice of lifewide education and individuals' lifewide learning enterprises can flourish.
 
Sources
(1) ​www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-cities.html 
(2)https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/aug/18/percentage-population-living-cities

Images
1 Contemporary Urban Landscape  https://www.dailypainters.com/paintings/213552/PEOPLE-CITY-CROWDS-TOM-BROWN-CONTEMPORARY-URBAN-LANDSCAPE/Tom-Brown
2 Illustration of a learning quarter Bradford City UK ​http://urbed.coop/projects/bradford-learning-quarter-spd
3 Learning Cities - urban ecosystems – a place where people interact with each other, their environment and the opportunities, resources and technologies within it in order to (C=context)live, learn and achieve things they value.  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280316988_Contextual_Sensing_Integrating_Contextual_Information_with_
Human_and_Technical_Geo-Sensor_Information_for_Smart_Cities

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    Purpose

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