Ecologies for Learning and Practice

Emerging Ideas, Sightings, and Possibilities

Ronald Barnett, Norman Jackson, Ronald Barnett, Norman Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351020244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ecologies for Learning and Practice provides the first systematic account of the ideas of learning ecologies and ecologies of practice and locates the two concepts within the context of our contemporary world. It focuses on how individuals and society are being presented with all manner of learning challenges arising from fluidities and disruptions, which extend across all domains of life. This book examines emerging ways of understanding and living purposively in these new fluidities and provides fresh perspectives on the way we learn and achieve in such dynamic contexts.

Providing an insight into the research of a range of internationally renowned contributors, this book explores diverse topics from the higher education and adult learning worlds. These include:

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• The challenges faced by education systems today

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• The concept of ecologies for learning and practice

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• The role and responsibility of higher education institutions in advancing ecological approaches to learning

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• The different eco-social systems of the world—local and global, economic, cultural, practical, technological, and ethical

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• How adult learners might create and manage their own ecologies for learning and practice in order to sustain themselves and flourish

With its proposals for individual and institutional learning in the 21st century and concerns for our sustainability in a fragile world, Ecologies for Learning and Practice is an essential guide for all who seek to encourage and facilitate learning in a world that is fundamentally ecological in nature.

1

Introduction

Steps to ecologies for learning and practice

Norman Jackson and Ronald Barnett

Introduction

The contemporary world obliges human beings to learn and to keep on learning across and throughout their lives in order to survive and flourish. It crowds in on one, bombarding individuals with new and even bewildering experiences. In this relentless onslaught, individuals react differently. Some relish the unforeseen, the unpredictability, the uncertainty and the instability that life brings, whereas others personally resist this never-ending challenge and look for ways to marshal their defences so as to retain their existing composure (or, more accurately, pretend to a composure that was already fragile if, indeed, it existed at all).

In such a context, the idea of learning ecologies has particular attractions. The idea of ecology, after all, breathes a sense of life and living, of relationships, of connectivity and interdependence, of growth and renewal, of sustainability, of evolution and resilience, and of elements being configured and working together to achieve something that the individual parts cannot achieve alone. The general setting is precisely of this nature. Individuals are interconnected with a buzzing welter of phenomena, of media, educational institutions, workplaces and social spaces, personal endeavours and relationships, and fast-flowing swirls of information, many only dimly felt. This configuration brings new experiences at least daily. The very essence of life itself constitutes an unfolding personal ecology or, more accurately, a multiplicity of overlapping and intermingling ecologies that prompt challenge, disjunction, creativity, and development. The act of learning is an ecological phenomenon that brings forth new meanings and understandings of the world and of one’s own being and identity in and with the world. The very act transforms us and the world around us. It is a learning ecology.

The connotations of ecology are, however, by no means exhausted by this resumé. In their natural state, ecologies have self-sustaining properties. However, as is well known, ecologies in nature may be impaired, often as a result of the interventions of humanity. So, too, with a learning ecology: We may inquire into its health. Is it balanced? Is it distorted? Is it oriented in sound and worthwhile directions? Are its dominant values legitimate and ethical? Are its purposes relevant, useful, and significant? Is it sustainable given the many competing demands that confront it?

Such questions open many planes in these initial considerations, and these planes are themselves interconnected. First, the very idea of ecology links people and their ways of thinking, being, and doing in a fundamental way to the environment in which they are learning. By ‘environment’, we are not only talking about the physical environment that we can sense and perceive; we are talking also about the rich, fertile environments we can create in our minds. Fundamentally, a learning ecology is a place where learning and the environment are indivisible.

Second, learning ecologies are necessarily value laden. Each of the entities—the flows of information, the objects, the relationships, the purposes, and the activities—that constitute learning ecologies is a carrier of values and is often an explicit site of values and their creation. The value-laden environment in which ecologies for learning and achievement are grown is a site where new meanings are sought and grown; indeed, learning ecologies are the primary sites for the creation of meaning in our lives. Furthermore, they are the sites for the maintenance of identity that relate to the values of individuals and to the making of new identities as individuals’ circumstances change.

Third, learning ecologies are present whether or not individuals are aware of them. They emerge from the milieu that forms the circumstances and substance of individuals’ lives, their hopes and ambitions, and the challenges, disruptions, and opportunities they encounter. They happen naturally and organically, but they also form intentionally as individuals orchestrate learning ecologies for themselves to achieve the things they value. Fashionably, we may say that there are differential elements of both structure and agency at work here. Learning ecologies comprise a structure that exerts its own powers upon human beings and their environment. Human beings, in turn, have a measure of agency in relation to those ecologies. They can, and do, in significant and meaningful ways, construct and adapt their own learning ecologies for themselves.

The unfolding and shaping of those learning ecologies—not least in the interplay between people’s juxtapositions of their learning ecologies with the exigencies and ambitions of life—is a never-ending life project. And this unfolding and shaping, however limited or however grand, takes place as it must within larger learning ecologies in which individuals find or place themselves. These considerations open to the idea that an ecology of learning is deeply embedded in ecologies of practice. Learning itself is practice. We cannot learn without doing something. Learning involves us in interacting with the world and the people and things in it, by experiencing and perceiving situations, trying to understand them, and responding in ways through which new meaning emerges.

Fourth, and connected to the ideas of value and meaning making, our ecologies for learning are catalysts for and a means by which we tap into the things that make us the unique beings we are. They stimulate and harness our imaginations and creativity to enable us to transform ideas, relationships, materials, and everything else in the world around us, and in this process, we transform ourselves and create new value in and for the world.

Fifth, it is evident that learning ecologies are not just personal matters, whether understood as collections of forces at work acting upon individuals or as learning biographies being assembled by individuals over time. Rather, learning ecologies are present at all levels of social interaction, including the societal (and even the global) level, and are deeply embedded in infinitely complex eco-social systems. It follows too, given our previous observations, that learning ecologies at the societal level are value laden and can be interrogated to see to what extent they are sound or may be impaired.

We see all this vividly in the contemporary world. The rise of populism, the use and manipulation of social media, the distortion of channels of news and communication, the mis-presentation of significant elements in the political sphere, and concerns over the diminution of the public sphere of debate and open reasoned discussion are all phenomena that suggest that we are in the presence of ecosystems that are being deployed to manipulate and subvert learning at the societal, if not at the global, level. Instead of society learning about itself in a set of rational open discourses, now it exhibits—as implied—grotesquely distorted and manipulated flows of communication, causing confusion and disruption to traditional order.

As a result, individuals are bombarded with data and information, and they commonly lack the resources to decipher the distortions and misinformation coming their way. In turn, the level of public understanding of complex issues decreases, and societal learning falls away, to be placed much more under the direction of the powerful battalions. In all of this, too, what counts as knowledge is characteristically skewed. The humanities become almost invisible in the wake of the stridency of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. At the same time, personal, informal, experiential learning, which might open the way to more authentic ways of comprehending the world, is down-valued in favour of data manipulation, governed by mathematical algorithms and cybernetic processes.

It emerges, then, that the concept of learning ecologies poses large issues as to the character of the world and people’s situations in it. To what degree do individuals have freedom to shape their own learning journeys through their life span? To what extent, perhaps unbeknown to themselves, are those pathways influenced, shaped, and even directed by others? To what degree, too, is society collectively able to form ever-developing and well-grounded understandings of itself?

There lies here the profound matter of the possibility of the individual’s learning ecology being a vehicle for self-transcendence and self-emancipation. Through his or her own learning ecology, the individual can become a better version of himself or herself. The old adage from Hamlet—‘To thine own self, be true’—can, in principle, be realised by individuals taking responsibility for continuing vigilance towards their own learning ecology. In this way, they may just be able to eke out a personal space in their own life-world that enables us to confer upon them such epithets as ‘integrity’, ‘own person’, ‘independence’, ‘autonomy’, and even ‘courageous’, ‘steadfast’, ‘steady under fire’, and ‘inspirational’. After all, the person who has a well-marshalled learning ecology of his or her own has managed to find a set of life projects that somehow hang together, that possess legitimate values, and that provide purpose to that person’s life, and that support the continually evolving identities he or she inhabits. To put it grandly, through their ecologies for learning and practice, such persons have emancipated and sustained themselves in all the hurly-burly and distortions of the contemporary world.

For the curious mind, these initial considerations generate many questions to stimulate inquiry. Here are just a few. What might be meant by ‘learning ecologies’ and ‘ecologies of practice’? What is the value of seeing learning, development, and practice as ecological phenomena? What are the implications and possibilities of learning ecologies for education? Would an ecological perspective on learning help people understand their own immersion, resilience, and sustainability in a complex but fragile world? And are there particular issues in bringing the idea of learning ecologies to bear on higher education?

Orientations

Throughout this book, the idea of ecology is drawn upon to frame a way of human beings perceiving, exploring, and inquiring into and making sense of phenomena such as learning, education, creativity, practice, and achievement. However, the origins of the ecological idea are founded in the branch of biological sciences dealing with the relationships and interactions of organisms with each other and with their wider natural environment.

The word ‘ecology’ was coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 (Stauffer, 1957) to describe the ‘economies’ of living forms. The term is derived from Greek οἶκος, meaning ‘house’ or ‘environment’, and -λογία, meaning ‘study of’:

By ‘ecology’ we mean the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence’.

(Stauffer, 1957, p. 140 translation from Haeckel, 1866, p. 286)

This place or environment in which organisms live, where interactions and encounters take place, and where the conditions necessary to sustain life are available eventually became known as an ecosystem, a term first employed by Sir Arthur Tansley (1935). Ostroumov (2002) provides a concise definition:

Ecosystem is the complex of interconnected living organisms inhabiting a particular area or unit of space [and time], together with their environment and all their interrelationships and relationships with the environment.

(Ostroumov, 2002, p. 141)

The interactions between organism and organism and organism and environment, and what emerges from these interactions, are fundamental to the biological sense of ecology. Within its ecosystem(s), an organism creates an ecology for living through which it fulfils essential daily needs such as feeding, sheltering, resting, and procreating. The ecosystem contains a myriad of organism-created ecologies for living, which interact as organisms compete for, consume, recycle, and produce resources in order to sustain themselves and their offspring. In this way, organisms individually and collectively help maintain and sustain the ecosystem as a whole.

A proposition underlying this book is that a parallel conceptualisation can be applied to human ecological systems—the set of relationships and interactions among people and other organisms, resources, and environments for the purpose of living. However, when people are the dominant organism in an ecosystem, living involves much more than sustaining life. Although all organisms learn to live with, and when necessary adapt to, their environment, ‘learning’—understood as the making and sharing of new meanings—becomes a force for significant activity and change in human eco-social systems (Lemke, 2000). Learning enables human society to advance, by using resources, reconstructing existing environments, and creating entirely new environments from our imagination. Unfortunately, some of the ways we are changing the environment also pose the greatest threat not only to our own ecosystem, but also to the ecosystems of every other living organism.

Learning is a lifelong and a lifewide process (Jackson, 2011; Barnett, 2011). Individuals learn in many ways; in many different social, personal, and virtual ‘spaces’; and often contemporaneously. As they learn, they change, but how do they cope with and manage their own transformations in the many diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Steps to ecologies for learning and practice
• PART 1 Towards ecologies for learning and practice
• PART 2 Advancing ecologies for learning and practice in higher education
• PART 3 Ecologies for learning and practice in the world
• Epilogue: Practice seldom makes perfect but …
• Author Index
• Subject Index