While my son's course clearly provided the 'backbone' to his 'learning about' archaeology it was the other experiences that he engaged with outside the course and in some cases outside the university environment, that enabled him to appreciate and learn what 'being an archaeologist' meant to him. If we relate these experiences to the conceptual framework I recently developed (below) we can appreciate that his learning experience embraced all the conceptual spaces in this framework. His course (A) did not, for the most part, encourage him to develop his own learning ecologies, beyond the traditional ecology of reading and assimilating codified knowledge. The one pedagogic strategy within his course that did cause him to create his own learning ecology was his final year project and dissertation (B). Outside the formal educational context he involved himself in various excavations (C) that were directed by others and through this he received support and guidance. He also initiated his own learning ecologies (D) for example by joining the editorial team of The Posthole Magazine, participating in various conferences outside the university and leading/organising his own conference for students.

Overall, this seems like a very healthy learning ecology through which my son gained the development he needed and wanted. And from an educational perspective this would seem to be a good outcome. But it was not accomplished through design. Rather, it depended on my sons own agency and passion for archaeology that drove him to seek out and get involved with opportunities in his immediate contexts and the wider world.

If, as I argue in my e-book chapter, the ability to create a learning ecology is essential to future learning there is an issue as to how universities encourage this orientation and capability within their learners and how they recognise learning and development gained through their involvement in activities outside the planned curriculum.

I was also pleased with the design of the Magazine cover which I had worked on with Kiboko... Although he had come up with the basic design I was able to influence the content which was formed around the idea of building knowledge to make a cake! 

But the most significant thing I did was begin building a new learning ecology to develop knowledge for  a talk I'm giving in November... Its still about 3 months off but I know how slow these processes can be. I want to find about the ways in which educational developers view their creativity in relation to their development work.  I decided to keep a record of my process to help me recognise and define my learning ecology. 

MY LOG
09/08
1    Wrote an abstract for the conference cannibalising an abstract I had         written but committing myself to a new theme that I new I had to  research
2  Already in email conversation with JC invited him to be my first subject
3  Created a rough plan for gaining knowledge and interacting with people




4   Spent some time searching using google scholar for obvious resources - eg 'relationship between creativity and development' 'creativity and educational development' - found nothing
5   Began compiling a list of educational developers I knew who I would  approach
6    Went on SEDA website and began searching through the journals for names of  educational developers who had written articles for Educational Developments.
7   Began thinking of social networks that I might engage and designed a simple  enquiry which I posted in two Linked-In networks.  'If, as Enrico Coen claims, 'creativity is a developmental process and development is a creative process,' then the two concepts are inextricably linked. What aspects of your development work cause you to use your creativity and how do you develop through this process? I  will happily produce a summary of any contributions.'
8   In email conversation with an e-portfolio developer KC invited her to contribute an interview. - she agreed

The actions with JC and KC showed that I was trying to engage people who I was already engaged with. The invitations I sent to talk to me about the role of their creativity in development caused me to think about the questions I would ask them. 

In my google search I discovered a review of Enrico Coen's which included an idea that was central to what I wanted to explore 'creativity is a developmental process and development is a creative process'. I formed my central research question around this.

In the context of your work as a developer in the field of education - What is the relationship between your creativity,  your development work and your own development?

15/08  
1) A chance email on the SEDA maillist mentioning an educational developer by name led to me contacting her by email to invite her to share her views. This required me to formulate an email enquiry.. Once this had been done I was more confident in contacting people.
2) I decided to cast my net more widely (internationally) and designed an email questionnaire. I googled educational developer blogs and found a number of contacts in the USA, Australia and Canada and contacted them speculatively..
3) Returning to Linked-in I spent several hours searching for 'educational developers'. I ended up with a list of twenty many of whom I knew and wrote a personalised email to each inviting them to share their perspectives through my simple questionnaire.

16/08 
This morning I had one reply to my enquiry with a set of responses and then another really interesting email from someone I had not seen for over 13 years indicating that they were very interested in a conversation. I replied at leangth.

TO BE CONTINUED

Reflections on my learning ecology:  With reference to my tool for visualising the components of a learning ecology. I had a context (a problem or challenge in my working life), I had the will and my decision to act was driven by a concern for the amount of time I had left to do the work. I used my imagination to create a rough plan of how I would proceed. I used my capability and knowledge of unstructured enquiry processes to make a start and trusted that what I sought would emerge. I made good use of google and Linked-in (especially) and used my existing knowledge resources derived from my work on creativity and how people bring about change in universities, I also used my knowledge of people I knew of who were involved in educational development. I used my existing relationships - making it a more personal and more natural engagement and more likely that the people I was interacting with would respond. I tried to personalise all my email communications. Results are limited so far but because I trust my process and believe that people will see the value and be interested in the outcomes - I believe that the information and insights I need will flow.

This is the first time I have felt able to record my thoughts and feelings. It's been a very difficult even traumatic few weeks for me and my family as we have had to cope with the ordeal of a member of the family becoming very ill a long way from home. My wife bore the brunt of it and has stayed close by him throughout. It has been an emotional rollercoaster and we have had to cope with the situation and deal with the worst imaginable scenarios. Thankfully he is getting better although progress is very slow. The experience has taught me once again that good health and mental, physical and emotional ability are just the most important things in life and how much we take them for granted day to day until they are removed. Its revealed an aspect of my wife's character and strength I knew would be there but which can only ever going to reveal itself in such situations. It's revealed the love and concern of our family and close friends. I think the ordeal has made our family stronger. It's given me experience and insights into life in intensive care something I have never experienced before and the enormous dedication, professionalism and kindness of clinical staff. But also seeing life on the wards and experiencing the frustrations as a parent of not being able to get the care and attention you need when you need it for your child and seeing just how much you have to fight sometimes to get the attention you need. Coping with the uncertainty of not knowing what was causing my son's illness was one of the hardest of things until you realise that it's almost academic and the most important thing is to treat the illness by every means until there is a positive response. Google also played its role in provided much needed but not wanted information on the possible conditions and outcomes we were dealing with.

I know the experience has had a significant impact on my feelings - at times totally drained of energy and numb while at other times overjoyed and everything in between. At the moment I am just thankful that we are where we are now and not where we were three weeks ago and I appreciate all that so many people have done to help him and us through the ordeal.

On Monday I contributed to another workshop on the ecological theme at Southampton Solent University. My co-presenters had the idea of using a shoebox containing various items that might be used to stimulate the imaginations of participants to think about their own ecological stories of learning. I decided to create my own shoebox of artefacts.. I knew I had a shoebox in the bottom of my wardrobe and as I retrieved it I thought about Jay Lemkes words about investing meaning in the artefacts in our lives. I thought that here I was in a space that I occupied most days (nights) of the year and it must contain objects that I have invested with special symbolic significance or I could create particular meanings because of the memories they evoked. It was an enjoyable and enlightening exercise.. My bedside table and drawers are quite messy so I found a number of objects that held particular meaning and most I could see were associated with considerable learning and complex relationships and events within my world of family, work and travel. I photographed the images in my shoebox and made a slide for my presentation ... I thought it a good exercise to bring home the ways in which the objects in our life hold significant symbolic, relational or experiential meaning. 

The shoebox ecology workshop ran by Christine Fountain and Susan Patrick worked from another direction. They filled two shoeboxes with objects and invited people to choose objects that they could associate with experiences and learning in their own lives.. two themes emerged ... gardening and occupying garden like spaces eg parks... and holidays..  and experiences people had had while travelling...or the effects of travel.... It was a wonderful example of the creative process of creating meaning from objects....

My son in law who is in the Blues and Royals regiment of the household cavalry managed to get me a ticket for Trooping the Colour an annual event at which the Queen presents the regimental colours (standard or flag) to the regiment. There is something about the immaculate uniforms, precision marching and riding combined with the music of military bands that strikes an emotional chord.... I felt privileged  to witness the event and also to be invited to have lunch in the officers mess at the Knightsbridge barracks... Family's are good at creating opportunities for each other.

I introduced my talk with a slide that portrayed my own ecological process for making my contribution to the event. I had concluded that my learning process had been purposeful and directional - towards creating the resources and personal knowledge to be able to contribute to the seminar and workshop and that it had also involved lots of other people - the people who had codified their understandings in the articles I had read and whose ideas I had assimilated and reused, the people I had talked to especially members of my family, the people who had written blogs which I had drawn on, accounts of learning written by past students at Surrey and my daughter's evolving account of learning as she helps us pilot the lifewide development award. My learning had been both a  constructive process and an organic social process. 

The workshop involved inviting participants to think of a learning project they had been involved in and to try in about fifteen minutes to record the key elements of their learning process. Each then told their story of learning and as a group we tried to think about the ecological aspects of the story. The process was quite revealing and on the train journey home (in true ecological spirit) I decided to email the people who had participated to invite them to continue working on the ideas that had emerged and to write them up as a co-authored paper to illustrate how such a workshop methodology can work in revealing the ecological process involved in lifewide learning. So far only two people have responded so I'm uncertain as to what will emerge from the process. But I feel sure that something useful will come from it. 

On Thursday I was thinking ahead to the next issue of Lifewide Magazine and thinking of potential contributors when I googled Jay Lemke - who has written extensively on ecosocial theory and  who I had really enjoyed reading. I came across a beautifully written and inspiring chapter he wrote in 2002.. on becoming a village.. I cite a passage below to illustrate..

An old saying has it that it takes a village to raise a child. As children, we know how much we need to learn about everything and everyone in our communities to live there successfully. As we learn, we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes on in the community. At the same time, we develop values and identities: in small tasks and large projects, we discover the ways we like to work, the people we want to be, the accomplishments that make us proud. In all these activities we constantly need to make sense of the ideas and values of others, to integrate differing viewpoints and desires, different ways of talking and doing. As we participate in community life, we inevitably become in part the people that others need us to be, and many of us also find at least some of our efforts unsupported or even strenuously opposed by others... The challenges of living in a village define fundamental issues for both education and development.1

His website had a contact email address and in the spirit of nothing ventured nothing gained  I decided to invite him to write a feature article for the next issue of the Magazine.. Within a few hours I had a very encouraging response which indicated that although in the midst of travelling from Europe to San Diego he had taken the trouble to follow the link I had given him to my website and had made a relational connection.. What a wonderful illustration of our ecologies in action.

Fortified by insights gained at the CRA workshop, the other important decision I made this week was to reframe the conference we are planning for next year to focus attention on the way that universities are supporting lifewidelearning ie I turned it from a criticism of inaction to the opportunity to celebrate achievement and progress. In spite of uncertainties I went ahead and booked the venue thus committing Lifewide Education to the conference in March next year. Making these decisions brought a sense of relief, as so often decision making does, and I was much happier at the end of the week than I had been at the start.

1 Lemke J L (2002) Becoming the Village: Education across lives, in G. Wells and G. Claxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/becoming-the-village.pdf

I am writing an essay on the ecology of learning for a seminar next week so the idea of ecologies has been very much in my mind.  The basic ideas underlying the ecology of family(1)  is that a family is a distinct closely related social group that interacts with their environment to form an ecosystem. Families carry out the following for the good of itself as well as the good of society: biological sustenance (have children and look after each other), economic maintenance (share resources), psychosocial nurturing (provide empathy and emotional support). Families and the environment are interdependent and they interact with multiple environments - typically each adult member inhabits a different physical/social environment. Adaptation is a continuing process in families.  They can “respond, change, develop, and act on and modify their environment.” Interactions between families and environments are guided by two sets of rules: Physical and biological laws of nature and human-derived rules (e.g., social /cultural norms). Our physical environments do not determine our behavior but pose limitations and constraints as well as possibilities and opportunities. Decision making is the central control process that directs our actions for attaining individual and family goals. Families are underlain and held together through shared values including its survival: maintenance and sustainability are important features of life and the “four great virtues that contribute to the ‘ultimate good’”: economic adequacy, justice, freedom and peacefulness. Other virtues that contribute to the quality of family life include: health, education and learning, loving and nurturing relationships, productive work and work environments, experiences and symbolic systems that sustain meaning and a sense of community, beauty and trustworthiness.

From an ecological perspective we might reflect on how our family functions and adapts to assure survival, how we collectively try to improve the quality of our lives, and how we contribute to sustaining natural resources. We might also consider how we allocate and manage resources over time to meet the changing needs of individuals and the family as a group. And how the environment (the meso-, exo-, and macrosystems of which we are apart impact on us.

Scanning  my blog I can see many references to our family and the ecology that sustains it and how the members of my immediate and the greater family impact on my life. For example, in my last blog I talked about my step nephew's search amongst family members for resources to enable him to finance some training to help him become a missionary both my wife and I have responded to him with financial and emotional help and he in return is coming to visit us in a couple of weeks.

This week has also been half term so I had the pleasure of looking after my six year old grandson for 24 hours. I have been very conscious since the twins have been born that I have spent less time with him and this sleepover, and the things we did together, were an important way in which we renewed our bonds. As we parted he said (as he so often does) 'I love you ganddad', which gets right to the point of good family relationships. 

Last Tuesday I, and my wife helped my daughter with childcare looking after all three of her children so that she could go to work. I suppose this is an example of family ecology in action to help sustain the family and enable resources to be brought into the family.

During the week my wife and I chatted at length to our two children at university listening to their problems (prep for exams and an important piece of coursework). They discussed their ideas for their future and we provided encouragement and practical suggestions where we could. Thanks to technology and mobile phones even when we are not physically together as a family we can remain in touch and have valuable conversations that sustain our family ecology.

Making full use of our physical environment, yesterday my wife took me and our daughter out for a light and chilly (we sat outside) lunch and after cleaning the house and working in the garden (maintaining our physical environment) we had some fun and went to the cinema to see The Great Gatsby. This morning I was made to jump on the scales to see how much I weighed fortunately I hadn't had any breakfast. I then proceeded to set the scales to give me my BMI. She had been reading a book about fasting and she passed on the science she had learnt on to me. The experience of public weighing and telling me that I was nearly obese was also intended to convince me that I needed to do something about it - the family ecology of nurturing our health and educating me was clearly in evidence.

On Sunday we celebrated the twins first birthday with a small family gathering for two of my children and their families including all four of my grandchildren. I guess that birthdays are symbolic in families when we pay attention to the particular member of the family whose birthday it is and the celebrations and gifts are tokens of valuing them as members of our family.

And as I complete this piece my daughter who is over from Dubai for a few days is staying with us. Last night we spent  time catching up and talking a lot about a particular matter involving another member of the family. I was struck by her deep concern and her willingness to provide both practical help and emotional support.

These simple stories of family life in the past week reflect the everyday functionings of our family. A family I am very proud of.  Each example illustrates the ecology that binds us together and gives us an important part of our identity and our sense of individual and social wellbeing. But these sorts of ecologies are learned. The values, attitudes and behaviours that underpin such ecologies are passed on from generation to generation propagated by parents who teach their children the importance of these things. I know that I and both of my wives learnt the meanings of family from growing up in our respective families and we have simply tried to practice the values and practices that were passed on to us through these lived experiences. I can no see the same patterns emerging as my children and step children find their own independent way in the world.

1) I found this powerpoint presentation which provided the core ideas for the ecology of family  www.public.iastate.edu/~hd_fs.511/lecture/Sourcebook17.ppt‎
Bubolz, M. M., & Sontag, M. S. (1993).  Human ecology theory.  In P. G. Boss, W. J. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. R. Schumm, & S. K. Steinmetz (Eds.), Sourcebook of family theories and methods: A contextual approach (pp. 419-448).  New York: Plenum Press.

One of the journeys every parent goes through with their children, particularly as they travel through their teenage years, concerns the 'what am I going to do? question. We have numerous conversations directly or indirectly that touch on this question and we see our children entertain and often repeatedly reject ideas. We also tell stories about how and when we discovered who we wanted to be. Because I have both older and younger children I can see that it sometimes takes a long time to discover your purposes, and I can also appreciate much more now the joy of discovering the parental purpose as I see my own children becoming loving and caring parents.

At this point in time the question is an urgent one for my son Navid who is just completing an archaeology degree. It is clear that there is a tussle going on between his passion for archaeology and the  realisation that it is difficult to pursue a career in this field. I remember a recent conversation I had with him when he said that finding the thing you really want to do in life was the million dollar question when you’ve discovered what that thing is you can spend the rest of your life working towards

In contrast a few days ago I had a wonderful email from a nephew which told me very clearly that he had discovered his purposes and how he was going to achieve his goals. You can't help but notice in his message the deep conviction that comes across from knowing what he wanted to do with his life.

Dear friends and family,

As some of you know this August I will be leaving England to go to Micronesia, the reason for this is that I will be attending Iris Ministries’ missionary school for 9 weeks. The aim of the school is to train up a group of missionaries who have a heart to go to the unreached places of this globe and/or to the darkest bits. Therefore, upon completing the 9 weeks, this is what I aim to do.

In order to do this I still need to raise a further £865 to pay the remaining tuition fees for Micronesia.

My heart is very much to go to the places that the world has forgotten about. Having spent time with such people in Southern/Eastern Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia I find great delight in sharing the love of Jesus with these people and watching him transform their lives. Furthermore, I desire to empower the communities that I will be living in, particularly women, seeking to further their advances in education and employment, whilst integrating myself fully into the environment I find myself in.

This summer I will be working to earn money, but due to the constraints of when I get paid it won’t arrive until after the deadline for the payment of tuition. Therefore, if you feel compelled to invest in the work that I will be doing whilst in Micronesia, and as a result what I will be doing in the subsequent months and years, then that would bless me immeasurably. Alternatively, if you would prefer to be a long-term partner, donating a specific amount each month then that would be equally incredible.

I’m incredibly excited to be embarking on this journey. From a young age I have had a heart to serve God cross-culturally, and now that the dream is coming into fruition I have to pinch myself at just how good it all is. For me, this is very much a vocation, and something that I feel called to for the long run.

Therefore if you would like to partner with me and invest in what lays ahead you can do so either through paypal:

https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/send-money-online

Simply type in your email address, and then mine ([email protected]) and the amount you would like to give. 

Or if you prefer to do via bank transfer just email me ([email protected]) for my bank details.

If you have any further questions that you would like to ask me, or sign up for updates while I’m away then do not hesitate to drop me an email, I will be more than happy to answer them.

I would like to thank everyone who has blessed me and covered me with prayer already. It truly does mean the world to me that you are willing to bless what I am doing and I feel very loved as a result. 

For more information on Micronesia, here is the link to the Iris Ministries’ Website: https://www.irisglobal.org/missions/harvest/micronesia

Massive love and blessings to all,

Bobby