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). 

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.

​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

Just once in a while I come across an educational initiative that changes the way I think. This week while paddling around YouTube I came across Swaraj University, near Udapair in Rajhastan NE India. Founded in 2010 by Reva Dandage, Manish Jain, Nitin Paranjape and Deborah Frieze, this is not a university in the sense we would recognise. It does not award degrees, there are no teachers in the academic sense, few buildings or classrooms the curriculum more or less emerges the through the process of learning and there are no exams. The concept of swaraj, or self-rule, was developed during the Indian freedom struggle. ... As Gandhi states, "It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves." Swaraj University uses this concept as a foundation principle for educational and pedagogical cultures and practices to support and enable self-determined and self-directed learning. Its a unique educational enterprise because each learner gets the opportunity to develop their own personalized learning programme based on their own dreams. Swaraj gives freedom to each student to decide what they want to learn, how they want to learn, and from whom they want to learn. Reva Dandage, co-founder says “Swaraj is India’s first university dedicated to strengthening our local cultures, local economies and local ecologies. Sustainability, social justice and holistic, healthy living are the core principles of our vision. Within this larger context, we are keen to support young people in putting their dreams into action and developing eco-friendly businesses that make a difference for the world.” Co-founder Nitin Paranjape says “We believe that everyone can learn and do something well in the world – unlike mainstream education which creates a lot of failures. They just need a chance to identify their talents, find their inner passions and be in a community of support.”

Of course, with these ideals, I immediately searched for more information and came across two articles by Rahul Hasija who writes a blog called The Freedom Walker  I tracked him down via Linked In and within a few days we were interacting. He generously agreed to write an article for Creative Academic Magazine developing the article that he had already written (see below) which provides a good overview of the educational approach being used. I am fascinated by the way this institution seems to be implementing ways of encouraging learners, which they call khoji's of seekers, to create their own ecologies for learning, creating and achieving and I intend to try and visit them in the new year to discover more.

READ RAHUL'S ARTICLE FOR CREATIVE ACADEMIC MAGAZINE

In my searches I came across these video clips by some of the founders of Swaraj University

A few weeks ago I was invited to a lunchtime discussion at Southampton Solent University on the theme of learning cities. I only recently came across the idea on my week long visit to the University of Limerick: Limerick had been awarded Learning Coty status bu UNESCO in 2017.  While I could imagine what a learning city might be but I thought I'd better find out a bit more about the UNESCO initiative.

Sometimes, in my experience quite often, things ​do not work out as you would hope.  I came across a blog post this week that reminded me of this in the context of the doctoral journey.

​Source of image Loretos Journey Towards a PhD blog
https://loretoonajourney.wordpress.com/

​This image of the ups and downs of a doctoral journey captures well the dynamics of any sustained exploration into the unknown. It seems to me that it is precisely because such journeys are full of ups and downs, turns and twists, obstacles, potholes and dead ends that they test our character and resolve and create the intrinsic motivations and desires to succeed that enable our creativity to flourish. One of the reasons for this is that these departures from what we hope will happen - are the sites that open up new possibilities. While the impediments that inhibit our progress or even set us back can make us feel bad they make us react and respond in an ecological way with our contexts and our physical and social world. They make us search for solutions to problems that we didn't even know existed until we found them. They make us do things that we would not have done had our unfolding present followed the pathway we had hoped and we experienced these things physically, emotionally and cognitively and learn.

​My role at the University of Limerick was different. Here I was the lead facilitator trying to coordinate the contributions of nine other people on a week-long CPD module. It was an entirely new module formed around the idea of Contemporary Issues in Higher Education. With the help of Programme Director Angelica Risquez we underpinned the curriculum with the idea of higher education ecosystems and used the opportunity provided by the module to explore how issues like, sustainability, internationalisation, leadership and creativity emerged from and impacted on institutional ecosystems. We also used some of the techniques we have learnt through our Creative Pedagogies and #creativeHE projects, for example designing a daily challenge but giving participants the freedom of how to interpret and represent their responses to the challenge. We also learnt from #creativeHE by creating a Google+ platform to encourage interactions and sharing outside the classroom. All in all I found it a most enjoyable and rewarding experience with many interesting insights emerging from the participants as each topic was considered and discussed and the production of some fantastic creative performances and artefacts. Once again it highlighted to me the enormous learning power and potential of faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds coming together to share their perspectives, ideas and practices.

But as the leader of the learning project my responsibilities didn't finish with the end of the module. I spent the last week trying to do some of the things I was expecting the participants to do namely create a website to curate what has been learnt and to reflect on what has been learnt. So that has been the main focus for work for the last 10 days.

Recognising our own learning is not easy. I could say that during this teaching project I produced certain artefacts that embodied new learning for the first time. But mostly I reused ideas and resources that I had used before. In the end I think my most important learning was at the highest metacognitive level. Through the experience I had worked out (learnt) what I had to do to make the whole process work in the way that I (and others) imagined. Yes I created new infrastructures and applied existing frameworks to new problems, but in the end it's what you do to make them work that matters and you only know this when you are doing it and when you have done it.
 
Of course much of the process was the result of other people's contributions (both facilitators and participants) but the pattern of engagement as a whole was the thing that I had imagined and tried to orchestrate - and so ultimately this is what I learnt and hopefully next time it will be better. With the proviso that a different group of participants may respond quite differently and therefore I would have to adapt. And that is the perpetual pedagogical challenge and the reason why pedagogy and the way people respond to pedagogy is an ecological phenomenon. 

You can view the website I have created and my reflections on my own learning here.

                                                                                    Happy memories

This is a post in progress and the end of the story has yet to be revealed. A week ago I attended a delightful reunion with the people I worked with over 20 years ago between 1995-97 when I worked for the Higher Education Quality Council. I worked with a small group in what was called the Quality Enhancement Division. At that time UK HE had expanded beyond all recognition in the space of five years and the Government was, not surprisingly, worried about the effects of their policies on academic standards. The Universities and Colleges representative bodies, under pressure from Government, tasked HEQC with trying to find out what was happening and more imp[ortantly how higher education could strengthen the ways in which it explained and assured its standards.

My group (right) was given the job of engaging the sector in a major inquiry which we called the Graduate Standards Programme. The work was intensive, challenging and very rewarding. It gave me a chance to engage with many people as I worked on modularisation and its effects. We produced over a dozen reports and presented our findings to many audiences across the UK. 

So I decided to try and create a wikipedia page. I was still in touch with Roger Brown (HEQC CEO) and the Directors of the Audit Division (Peter Williams) and Enhancement Division (Robin Middlehurst). Together we put an outline together which was factually correct and I posted my draft article in my sandbox on the wikipedia site and invited a reviewer to look at it. To my surprise it was rejected by the peer reviewer who noted that 'This submission's references do not adequately show the subject's notability. Wikipedia requires significant coverage about the subject in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.'  For the past week I have been trying to glean references to HEQC's work and existence that are relevant and appropriate. It has been quite a task involving hours of searches but I hope I have now done enough to justify our existence. So watch this space!

Sadly it got rejected again with a similar message. I was very frustrated so I have now passed it to another former HEQC colleague who has promised to look at it. And so the story goes on..

As I was writing this article I came across a fascinating autobiographical blog post which began with the words, 'The more I debate education the more convinced I am that people’s own educational biographies impact their idea(s) [1] I agree with this wisdom but I think we can go much further.As a teacher our own educational and learning experiences and biographical histories hugely impact on our beliefs, values, pedagogical thinking and practices. Who we are and how we have become who we are is the result of the history of experiences we have had and how we have responded to the ever unfolding present, reflected on and tried to make sense of our past and imagined and planned for our uncertain future
 
In the past few weeks I have been thinking about the idea of 'personal pedagogies' the pedagogical knowledge, theory and beliefs we develop over time, from many different sources and experiences that we make our own and draw upon in order to practice as a teacher, facilitator, activist or whatever role requires us to draw upon this resource.
 
One of the things I did was to facilitate a #lthechat on Twitter to explore the idea with people who were interested. The format of Twitter is quite limiting for explanation of complex ideas so I created a picture to stimulate discussion (Figure 1). Pictures are the way I visualise something they enable me to make what I imagine visible and they enable me to engage people and gain their perspectives (feedback) on my ideas. I know from many experiences that this works especially if the picture is incomplete and people can add their own ideas or alternative perspectives.
 
Figure 1 The first version of my personal pedagogies visualisation used in the #lthechat 08/13/17

​Intuitively, I know when confronted with a new teaching situation that I must draw upon this way of thinking and doing but its only when I take the trouble to think about my own history that I can see the origins of my visual thinking and representation lie in my childhood interest in drawing and painting. Its only through reflecting on the things I have done in my life that I can see how this interest has transferred and been used in lots of different roles and how, as new technologies have become available I have used these to improve my ability to communicate. The way I involve myself, and others (I often work with Kiboko Hachiyon an illustrator) in the creation of pictures to help me visualise and explain is a fundamental feature of my pedagogical practice when I try to engage learners and peers in learning processes and so in this way it has become an integral part of my pedagogical practice.
 
I use this illustration to show how, with a bit of effort, we can construct a biography that seeks to make sense of our pedagogical journey and identify the origin of the knowledge, beliefs and values that influence our thinking and practice as a higher education teacher.
 
OPEN INVITATION
If you would like to join our Personal Pedagogies project please join our open conversation between March 27-31 on the #creativeHE Google+ Forum
https://plus.google.com/communities/110898703741307769041
During this conversation you will be encouraged to create and share your own pedagogical narrative.
 
Alternatively, if you would like to create and share your own pedagogical narrative I would be very interested to see it.

References
Mcinerney L (2012) Schooling Biography blog post
https://lauramcinerney.com/2012/11/25/schooling-biography/

Where learning is concerned the present and the past are most definitely connected along a complex trajectory. Our past learning clearly influences how we perceive and act in the present but also what we do in the present can be connected to our past. Over the last few weeks, two incidents in my life have drawn my attention to this principle.
 
Two weeks ago my wife and I spent a very enjoyable evening with some friends swapping life stories and family histories. During the evening our host mentioned that he had written several articles, including some that had been published in the Hindu Times, a prestigious Indian newspaper. He spoke at length about one of these articles, which was concerned with a trip he had made with his family to the place of his birth - Kashmir. His family home had been burnt down in the conflict that emerged in the 1990's and they had fled the country. Even though Kashmir is still quite dangerous he made the journey with his children to show them his country and to see for himself what it was like. I was moved by his story and the next day I found and read his article 'Back to the Valley' and was moved even more by his story. I kept reflecting on what he had said until I realised that he had created an ecology in his present life to revisit and explore his past so that he might, experience and understand more deeply his past and his relationship with it and his family might know him better and appreciate their relationship with his past.

​This week I am fortunate to be on holiday with my wife – in fact the first we have taken without our children. So that is quite a novelty in itself. I found the cheapest deal on-line and it happened to be in Tenerife. As I write this we have just returned from a day trip to Mt Tedei the dormant volcano which dominates the south centre of the island. We took a taxi from outside our hotel and drove an hour into the mountains, through the steep pine clad slopes and clouds and then out into the stunning brightness and our first site of the towering volcano with its classic pyramid shape reaching 3700m.
 
We spent the next four hours driving around the volcano and I was happy as Larry. Why? because just for that few hours I reached back in time to a life I once had and I became a geologist again. By that I mean my interest was engaged like a geologist, I thought like a geologist, I wondered and puzzled like a geologist, I poked around in the rocks and picked rocks up to examine them like a geologist, I saw and observed like a geologist, I speculated on the structures I was seeing, I drew on my knowledge if volcanic geology and my past experiences of seeing volcanic geology to interpret what I was seeing, I tried to make sense of what I saw and tried to explain what I was seeing to my wife (who didn’t know me when I was a geologist and had never seen me in this mode). Actually, she was interested and that encouraged me to say more. 

I felt like a geologist (well as much as one could be without actually being systematic, taking samples and making a map). I certainly gained a sense of satisfaction when I came across a public notice that explained the geology and it more or less confirmed what I had been seeing and saying. Not only that, I wanted to talk about some of my experiences as a geologist and the people I had worked with as a geologist which took me into my past when I worked as a geologist in Saudi Arabia (far left).

​My experience amongst the landscapes and rocks of Mt Tedie triggered something quite deep that was cognitively, emotionally and physically a part of me. A way of being that although I did not practice it: a bit like riding a bike. The experience was overwhelmingly positive I felt pleasure, excitement and joy at being in the landscape and puzzling the geology of that landscape, handling the materials of the landscape and remembering knowledge I had not used for many years. It reminded me that even though I don’t have a label called geologist.. being a geologist is part of my identity and I will carry it to the grave (or at least as long as I am conscious of my past).

This incident in my current life, brought about by the circumstances of our holiday, provided a good example of how the physical things we do in our present can connect back to the past and remind us of who we are, what we have done and how we have felt, far more than an act of remembering alone could ever do.  One could argue that I created an ecology for achieving this experience involving the context – the holiday in Tenerife, the affordance – in the geology of the particular place and space, the resources - our taxi driver who provided us with access to the space, the knowledge I had developed in the past and the knowledge  available in the public notices, the conversations with my wife, the relationships with the rocks and landscape, with the subject, the spaces – that contained these things and my relationship and interaction with all these things.. and my past.

One of the fundamental principles I learnt as a geology undergraduate,  made famous by geologist James Hutton, is the 'present is the key to [understanding] the past'. These two seemingly unconnected incidents in my life conspired to create the belief that exploring our past through the things we do in the present is a subject worth exploring so we will use this idea as the theme for the October 2017 issue of Lifewide Magazine. If you have a story that is relevant to this idea, and you would like to share it through our magazine, please leave a comment or get in touch. 

Source
Raina S (2016) Back to the Valley Hindu Times
http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/back-to-the-valley-back-to-jammu-and-kashmir/article6386499.ece