Abstract
It is more than a decade ago that I first explored the notion of a ‘learning community’ (Clarke 2000). Whilst the overall goal remains the same, there are now important new ecological insights that can be added to our earlier understanding, which heighten the urgency for a more radical consideration of learning community to ensure that practice is both educationally sound, and ecologically sustainable within such a community.
This paper serves as reference to some of this new thinking. To provide a context, it will refer to the earlier work, and indicate the limitations and breakthroughs of the earlier work which, with the benefit of retrospect, have become apparent.
The paper is structured around four themes that I continue to draw upon as the basis of my own learning – themes of practicalities, guidance, radicalism, and transition. The paper concludes with the first formulation of a framework for sustainable learning community based upon these and earlier observations and insights.
Sustainable Learning Community
‘I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.’ Vaclav Havel, Czech President, Speech in Philadelphia, July 4 1994
Let us begin with what this is not. A ‘sustainable learning community’ is not an intentional community, a form of community that spans the likes of school academies, eco-villages, housing corporations, gated communities, retirement villages and communes. These places tend to attract like-minded people and are segregated through self-interest and isolationism. What I am interested in is something simply more authentic, something that is a sensible response to an increasingly artificial, disconnected, alienating landscape for living in which we seem to have found ourselves. It is a place which values more than profit, it is concerned with life, all forms of life, and how an appreciation of this puts one in a different state of mind, understanding and action.
I will use ‘sustainable learning community’ as the term which captures a set of capabilities (Sen 1999), one where we depend upon each other to generate understanding, engagement and participation and through which we can respond to social, environmental and economic collapse (Putnam 2000, Orr 1994, Soros 2008). I describe the concept of sustainable learning community as an emerging network. It is an interdependent construct of human activity. Sustainable learning community functions as the manifestation of a set of capabilities within and between a diverse set of communities of connection, communities of place, communities of interest, and communities of action. Learning plays a significant part in framing our definitions of community and the capabilities that sustain learning communities, sometimes impeding, sometimes enabling and focusing the development of these capabilities.
Historically the school was at the inter-connect of these capabilities. However, increasingly the school is a part-player, the setting of a sustainable learning community is always within the wider social context and as such, learning takes its place at the centre, but not necessarily learning within the institution of the school. This does not mean that the school ceases to exist, but it does mean that the concept of ‘school’ is to change from being seen as a singular concept. It is both a location, and an idea, to be established on a wider scale under this new frame – a sustainable, learning community.
Practicalities
Earlier work (Clarke 2000) arose from a growing disquiet over the direction of the school effectiveness and improvement movement and represented an attempt, a flawed attempt as it turned out, to design a way forward through the concept of a ‘learning community.’ I argued for a shift from the mechanical interpretation of the process of education, to a living systems interpretation of the process of education that was grounded in lived-experience that drew more from the ecological than the managed world-view (see figure 1) (Binney and Williams 1995).
Figure one: From a managed to an emergent paradigm (adapted from Clarke 2000)
Paradigm of managed change Paradigm of change as emergent phenomena
First order dominated – making what already exists more effective and efficient Second order dominated – confronting organizational issues and challenging orthodoxy
Delivery focused Reflective and process focused
Visionary Innovative, seeking novelty
Change as simplification of self Change as complexification of self
Isolated and individually accountable Collaborative and collectively responsible
Individualistic outcomes Interdependent outcomes
The core practices of the learning community emphasise education as a practice of freedom (Sen 1999), through a focus on participatory voice, choice, connectivity and action. The kernel of these observations is found in the aim to generate community – something beyond self, and as such, to generate systemic practices that transcend self.
With this transition in mind, a set of community-oriented actions were formulated. The basis of these was that we cannot make complete sense of the future, but we can bring together our various ideas and ambitions for the future and generate possibilities which both prepare our thinking and make us more open to take advantage of unexpected chance and opportunity.
Listening to local agendas: this implies under-management rather than over-management –it raises concerns over how to create the conditions where ideas can be voiced freely, where people can meet regularly to reflect and reconstruct their thoughts with others, and where people could bring new ideas and interests to share and expand upon with colleagues.
The recent work of Scharmer (2007) captures the essence of listening to local agendas through its focus on co-initiating, co-sensing, co-presencing, co-creating, co-evolving and generating root principles. His work is concerned with trusting the expediency of the learners, constantly ensuring that they are in a position where they are capable of making choices to inform their next learning steps.
Designing in systems to tackle difference: A difference between a planned (managed) system and a learning (living) system is the level to which the system will tolerate innovation and realignment as a result of new knowledge. This raises concerns over how a learning community encourages people to develop the capability to use difference constructively and creatively. It uses this capability to deepen awareness and responsiveness of the participants engagement with change, and to inform choices that are made.
Seeking patterns: There seem to be at least two different types of pattern which are important for the learning community: the first, are the patterns of behaviour, routine, decision making, organization that clearly illustrate the community ethnography, how it ‘does things’ (Massey 1998). These explicit, visible patterns of the organization are observed as it about its daily activity; for example the routines and procedures that are followed. The second patterns are the more hidden implicit patterns. These are often taken as ‘given’ aspects of the community and are cultural, ethos-driven dimensions – and can be explored primarily through the formulation and support of relationships. In order to connect with these second sets of patterns there is a need to consider ways of bringing people together to look at learning as process and practice. One way we have explored how to do this is in our work in IQEA has been through the use of shared enquiries that adopt working protocols. The intention is to generate a shared method of enquiry (which focuses on operational process) which can serve as a focusing device to expose and illuminate more implicit forms of working activity (operational practice), and enhance awareness of the influence that implicit knowledge has upon the day-to-day life of the community.
Emergent approach to strategy: Any period that results in change, can, retrospectively, be measured in terms of the willingness of the community to move with, or resist the new conditions, as Charles Handy (1995) says, ‘life makes sense in retrospect.’ If more people within the community are engaged in activity that encourages communication, provides support for personal learning, and enhances the opportunity to connect and co-construct their observations of their learning in the workplace, a generative version of strategy begins to emerge.
Recognising the configuration: When do you intervene, and when do you not intervene? Over time, there is a shift of power within a learning community that moves away from power exercised through structure towards power that is generated through relationships. This is why the ‘learning’ dimension of community is so significant, as the capability of a sustainable learning community is demonstrated through its ability to create working relationships that encourage collaborative experimentation into unknown areas of knowledge. It is by default, a collective activity and a transitional activity.
Guidance
It was during the exploration of these ideas with schools through my association with IQEA, that the contrast between the theory and practice of ‘learning communities’ became apparent. Our work focused attention upon practitioner enquiry into pedagogy and practice, creating new management approaches to facilitate learning, and changing structure within schools to improve quality of provision. This work also extends to the use of inter-school protocols for exchange of ideas, practice and shared enquiry. Whilst many schools embrace the principle of this approach, it has become clear that the managerial structure within and between schools often impedes rather than enhances practice-based efforts to change the learning ethos. This is because managerial narrative permeates every aspect of institutional activity, from staff structure, decision making, and curriculum design and practice, to community outreach and inter-institutional liaison.
As an organising device, managerialism has been the instrument of choice for school improvement (Thrupp and Wilmott 2003). It functions within a paradigm of predictability and accountability, and its approach is risk-averse being maintenance rather than developmentally orientated. Furthermore, the managerial approach is inherently individualistic, designed to optimize functionality at the individual level amongst all members of the school. This fundamental aspect of managerialism is epistemologically at odds with an ecological approach – it fails to transcend the self. Its ‘way of knowing’ does not recognize the value of interconnectivity and interdependence as an essential criteria of community. For example, where managerialsm assumes conformity and shared vision, the same would not be either an expectation or a desired state within an ecological context – Why have a monoculture when you can enjoy bio-diversity? A commitment to relationship in the form of dialogue (Bohm 1996), a practice of choice and freedom (Sen 1999) is a commitment to the possibility for change that can arise from any point of contact within a system brings with it an implicit knowledge that the transition is a collective, not an individual endeavour. Relationship and community are therefore critically significant elements in the formulation of any effort to generate a sustainable learning community.
Paradoxically, whilst school leaders continue to express concern and unease that managerialism is vehicle of choice for those who are required to introduce and ‘manage’ change, it remains deeply embedded as the mainstream practice. Whilst it has been argued elsewhere that this restlessness amongst school leaders is at this stage intuitive, rather than rational (Atkinson and Claxton 2000, Clarke 2001) there clearly remains an unease amongst lead professionals, that somewhere in the drive for higher performance there is a disconnect between beliefs, values and assumptions of how we might wish to live and work in a learning community, and how we are currently living and working in our schools as they attempt to make any transition. This contrast between ambition and reality is developed further in the work of Fallon and Barnett (2009) who describe the condition as ‘Pseudo Community,’ a state where the community reality fails to match the community ambition.
I guess for some this is a jump too far, and that we are perpetually destined to fit in with the prevailing socio-cultural context. But take a moment to reflect again upon Havel’s quote at the start of this paper and ask what if we are in such a transitional period, what does this imply for the idea of ‘business as usual’ and is that an acceptable state to be in if we are trying to educate the next generation towards a better future? ‘I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.’ (Havel 1994) Somehow, we need to explore how to step over the problem of pseudo-community without falling into the trap of determinism in another form. My suggestion is that we get some way there through a dialogue, a dialogue on the nature of a core process which engages with future possibility, is more at ease with uncertainty, with the unfolding of learning and more willing to utilize critical and participatory processes of change.
In effect, we need some form of guidance which can extend outwards from the dominant managerial frame, and provide some insights and examples of other ways in which the learning community might function, under different paradigmatic frames, attending to different socio-cultural and educational ambitions.
In his discussion of ontological and epistemological grounding in what he and others describe as ‘Prescencing’, Scharmer (2007) (see also Senge et al 2004) captures the essence of these observations diagrammatically (see table one). I want to allude to two specific issues of note here; first, that systems theory and systems thinking (Senge 1990) has opened a debate on the phenomenon of emergence, and ‘second, the acceptance of the idea of embeddedness, where all systems and knowledge are situated in context’ (Scarmer 2007) provides us with a way of sense making – through creating connection and interdependence which in turn serve to emphasise and reinforce the importance of community. I found these two observations extremely helpful in that they clarify the significance of the ontological and epistemological frames – ways of doing and ways of knowing about the learning community.
Table one: Ontological and epistemological grounding of systems theory (Scharmer 2007 p.107)
In my recent work (Clarke 2009b) I have identified that the collusion and corrosion of practice as service (after Sennett 1998, McIntosh 2001), where people persist in living with a disconnect between what they value and what they actually do, and how this corrodes their concern, love and commitment to others in their care is storing up tensions and stresses within individuals and within school communities who are pushed towards a culture of isolationism, individualism and self-interest. This discord, effectively comes down to an unequal and unstable relationship of power, within, between schools and the accountable authorities. Schools increasingly operate through a fragmented hierarchy, where the institutional structure is more convoluted, but no more equitable in its power relationships. Delegation, distributed leadership and what Harrison (1994) calls ‘concentration without centralisation’ sees control being exercised through setting individual goals for each worker within the school, each person is free to pursue the achievement of these goals in whatever way they wish but this freedom is qualified. The achievement of the goals often exceed the capabilities of the individual, the resources and facilities required rarely match the expectation (Sennett 1998), but the management response is to push harder for the results, hence the disconnect. Scharmer’s (2007) work serves to inform and illuminate the basis of these observations still further through the identification of what he calls ‘blindspots’ in leadership and management. It is through shared enquiry into the construct and intention of management structures that many of these blindspots are revealed. A consistent message arising from this work is the mismatch between intention and outcome, yet our organizational practice, framed within managerialism, continues to persist in an approach where rhetoric and reality clearly do not connect. This is as true in learning communities as it is in any other form of institution where the dominant frame of accountability is managerial in design. There are some very real emotional effects that arise from these organizational realities. First of all it is recognized that it is personally stressful to manage the discord (Sennett 1998, Clarke 2001), second, as Fallon and Barnett (2009) indicate, it institutionalizes insincerity and a culture which lacks integrity. Any transition has to take account of this phenomenon.
Peter Senge and his colleagues (2004) have looked at how to overcome this complex issue in terms of organizational learning. They explore what they call ‘deep structure’ issues, where people generate the capability within their institutions to confront and challenge existing beliefs, values and assumptions. These beliefs, values and assumptions provide the bedrock upon which the ‘surface structure’ (ibid) of rules, procedures and processes become real, and which often impede the learning potential of the community. The combination of the deep structures and surface structures go a long way to define the activity of a society, an organisation, a community, a classroom, and a family – as they are the powerful ties that bind.
In our case, having a well conceived theoretical framework that illuminates the uses of power within a community such as a school may assist in our thinking about how to operationalise a transition towards a learning community, and might help us to interpret the reality of the school in a new way. It remains the case that there is a dearth of material available for schools to do this. We still mediate the meaning of learning community through the prevailing dominant narrative of the managerial design (DuFour 2004, Roberts and Pruit 2003, Stoll and Seashore 2007, Watkins 2005). It seems appropriate therefore that the development of capability to create sustainable learning communities is supported with theory that is framed and informed from developmental work that draws from analysis and interpretation of the ecological knowledge base, if any transitional thinking is to occur.
Paqette and Fallon (in press) discuss these ‘framing’ issues in detail in their recent work. Defining four paradigmatic frames, (managerial, existential, dialectical, and living system) they describe the most likely learning community epistemology that will emerge when located within specific socio-cultural and educational paradigms (see figure 2).
These paradigmatic frames are not rigidly determined; earlier research (Bertrand and Valois 1980) indicated that very few schools and school systems operate within the assumptions and values of only one paradigm. Instead, schools migrate between different paradigmatic frames, often pursuing interests and then rather awkwardly reconciling the incongruous nature of very different value driven consequences (ibid). Nevertheless, they found that teachers and administrators in most learning communities orientate in favour of a single socio-cultural paradigm and a single educational paradigm, and that the latter flows from the former.
Figure 2: Paradigmatic theory frames (adapted from Paquette and Fallon in press)
Managerial paradigm Existentialism paradigm Dialectic paradigm Living systems paradigm
Socio-cultural frame Positivist and economic efficiency assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society A person centered way of understanding self and society Communist and socialist assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society The sustainability of life systems and non-hierarchical complementarity of individuals and communities as ways of being and relating in a society
Educational paradigm frame Characterized by a view of education as an efficient transmission of predetermined knowledge designed to promote rational learning and knowing and maintain a socio-economic order Characterized by a view of education based on empowerment of a creative, confident, and free individual who shapes his/her learning process Characterized by a view of education as a dialectical form of knowing to promote the common good through a process of collectivism and mutual assistance leading to a classless society Characterized by a view of education based on a mode of knowing in which learners develop their capacity to create new alternatives by producing knowledge that promotes a vision of society based on non-hierarchical and democratic decision making and a complementarity of differences
Fallon and Barnett’s (2009) work opens up a way of conceptualizing these multiple possibilities for discussion about the current and future direction that a learning community might take. In a time of economic and ecological turbulence, it is useful to examine the possible implications, opportunities and limitations which existing, and potentially new, operational frames can provide. These frames enable more informed and strategically suitable responses to be developed by participants, and they also provide a way of coping, as Schein (2004) observes, if nothing else, understanding helps us to cope with change.
Any framework has to make it possible to ask the question: Which developmental direction would be most appropriate, given what we know of our changing circumstances? The clear message from our observations is that, as schools grapple with the wish to create a learning community, they may be locked into a paradigmatic frame that impedes their chance of moving forward, which is accountable to a wider systemic approach that adheres to a different set of guiding rules and principles, beliefs and values than those they may be forming in response to any new ambition or understanding of their own changing context.
As we have observed, circumstances beyond their own making can place teachers and headteachers, students and parents on a collision course where their collective ambition is impeded by organizational structure. The different paradigmatic world-views can interfere with each other, but the fact remains that they function from different interpretive frames – they represent different epistemologies. As a result, in a period of stability the power of the dominant narrative prevails, and school communities find that they are not making the change to a learning community because this managerial narrative impedes the transition, it is locked to the central, rather than any form of locally conceived accountability framework.
However, as we have recently experienced from the dramatic changes in the world of banking, we do not live in a stable, predictable and managed world (Soros 2008). In effect, the door is open for new and alternative model systems to be explored and designed.
So to conclude on this part of the discussion, the last decade has developed the concept of the learning community in the form of greater understanding of the change process and enabled practitioners to enhance their clarity of focus upon learning with renewed vigour. It also enhanced the possibilities and ‘freedoms’ for individuals to pursue change in their own ways through greater distributive forms of leadership (Harris 2008), but this introduced new forms of decentralized hierarchy and failed to bring with it an adequate redistribution of power. As such, the learning community initiative has become plagued with managerialist goals which have imposed a particularly incremental form of learning in schools. For school leaders, this provided the context for initially reinforcing (Jackson 2007), but ultimately self-defeating processes of change (Clarke 2009a). At this time, it is more likely that we hear of schools using learning community instrumentation to reinforce and strengthen existing ways of operating under the illusion of self-agency but within the accountability culture, than it is to emancipate and empower the learner within the community.
At its simplest, I think we can say that the managerial paradigm has defined a deficit model of education, where schools, students and professionals all adhere to a thought world where success is defined by knowing, and that the ‘knowing’ is something that is more often than not defined by somebody else, somewhere else. In Michael Fielding’s work this impediment is an issue of democratic representation (Fielding 2001), Terry Wrigley argues that this impedes working class access to the curriculum (Wrigley 2001, 2005), in Tony Kelly’s work it manifests itself as a critically important matter of freedom (Kelly 2009).
From whatever critical position we adopt, it is clear. The resulting ‘catch up’ of those charged with providing the educational service within this knowledge framework is perpetual; no matter how well intentioned and well designed those pursuing learning community design from within the existing paradigm will never resolve the problem of ownership and power, because the ownership of the knowledge is beyond the self, or the resources of the organisation of the school to control (Thrupp and Willmott 2003).
These observations first serve to compound and vindicate small successes, and then they doubly disempower those who are struggling to deal with existing demands, because any success in moving towards a learning community inside the existing paradigm serves to reinforce even more the existing order of things. Second, the entire system that serves to manage and improve education is now premised on an illusion of ownership, choice and power that is generated by their pursuit of learning community within the managerial frame. So we have inspections, national curricula, state mandates, off-the-shelf solutions which schools previously had to adhere to, now being superseded by an illusion of choice and freedom to design schools and curriculum according to local interest and needs. However, they have to be accountable not to their own criteria of success, but to a level of evidence of alignment with the centrally managed direction of flow. It is initially reinforcing, and locally affirming. People see success, they are reported as improving, they receive adulation, they then buy into the idea that it is the only game in town, and once they do this the likelihood of introducing any alternative design is impeded, significantly.
What we see in educational reform is therefore a repeating pattern, as Seymour Sarason (1993) reported, ‘a predictable failure’ that lies deep in the managed system, a prevailing misconception about the meaning of educational, and socio-cultural change.
It is this situation that I maintain is no longer sustainable. Managerialism has distracted people too much from the important focus and time needed to nurture deep relationship. There are too many externally pressing challenges for business as usual to prevail.
Despite the failings and frustrations, I have remained closely aligned to the central tenet of the theoretical framework. That is, that we need to make a profound shift in our developmental narrative and take it from the mechanical to the living system. In so doing, we embed deep into the functionality of any new design, the fundamental truth that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, we are living beings pursuing our lives within a living system. This recognition, and realization, has prompted a renewed focus upon the capabilities associated with generating relationships as the central agenda of a guide to radical redesign and transition, and it is to this that I will now turn my attention.
Radical Transition
My earlier observations generate questions concerning transition. How will school move its function from schooling to a new form of sustainable pedagogy? In so doing, how will it create the capabilities to connect to new ways of organising which are necessary if such a transition is to be realized? This concern focuses attention on the ways that we might act, establish and maintain relationships, given the need to touch both deep and surface structure change.
Whatever emerges as an educational institution in an ecological paradigm, learning will continue to play a central role, but the interconnect between learning and other capabilities needs to move us from the problems of the over-managed, institutionally-bound learning community of old. We need to first consider, and then develop these capabilities and use their development as part of the metric of change to illustrate and measure our success.
When we think about the future relationship between the community and school, it seems to me that community is what will be developed, and what develops it will be learning. It is only through thinking about community as a forum for development of interdependencies that we have any real possibility of making progress on the socio-cultural transition towards an educational agenda for a more sustainable form of life on the planet. If we are to enhance our capability to learn new ways of living which have a reduced footprint on the environment of the planet I think we have to consider how we re-define our relationship with a dominant community based institution – the school. This takes us beyond the current idea of building schools for the future and building learning communities, into an exploration of a renaissance of community for the future.
I have suggested that schools might pursue, and be genuinely committed to the notion of a learning community, but that the prevailing systemic design, managerial in structure, impedes the likelihood of those schools ever realising that goal. The fact that schools might be exploring different dimensions of learning community, such as extended participation of the student body in decision-making and management, greater levels of community involvement, more emergent forms of curriculum design, greater forms of inter-institutional enquiry are in themselves steps towards transition. But until they are conceptually shifted onto a paradigmatic frame which takes interdependency, community and co-construction as serious systemic concepts, they will continue to function as Pseudo Community. All of these dimensions indicate a progression from earlier managerial models, and substantiate Fallon and Barnett’s (2009) observation of schools migrating between one paradigmatic frame to another. But the substantive challenge, of moving into a different operational frame as the modus-operandi, remains ambition rather than reality until the conceptual shift occurs to the interdependent modelling. In effect, I am sugesting we need to re-colonise and radicalise the idea of sustainable learning community.
I suggest that the development of sustainable learning community is not to be defined as new buildings and priorities imposed through government reforms, nor as recycled ideas of the old model of school, but as a set of relationships, conceived as interdependencies which may be practiced face to face, or through the new opportunities open to us through technology. These interdependencies come in the form of individual engagement, through connection with ideas and shared interests, and through collective action in the pursuit of new freedoms. As Sen (1991) argues, ‘Greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development’ (p.18). As such, we combine educational change with a new economic model (Brown 2002), where development of sustainable learning community is the ground for future living.
What might this look like?
Sen (1999) describes the qualities of collective action which widen the opportunity for individuals to generate forms of wealth as ‘capabilities.’ It is a combination of these capabilities in the form of dependencies of what I call connection, place, interest and action that I wish to explore when we move forward in our consideration of a framework for a sustainable learning community. We look for ways to create connection between the broader definition of wealth, the learning community, the living systems paradigm of sustainability and new pedagogy in the form of learning.
Figure three: Capabilities of an interdependent sustainable learning community
An Education for Sustainability Framework
The Education for Sustainability Framework provides schools with a unifying overview and foundation for sustainable living. The framework uses the ideas explored in this paper and from other theoretical ideas elsewhere (Capra 2002, Orr 1994, Whitefield 2004, Kelly 2009, Wenger 1998) to underpin practice and adopts a systematic, coherent and practical approach to the sustainability issue to inform school decision-making.
The Framework has developed as a result of practical feedback from fieldwork, development programmes, working closely with school networks and with teacher practitioners for many years. It brings together this experience, along with the very best of contemporary knowledge of emergent management practices (Scharmer 2007). The use of the framework will facilitate a successful engagement of participants in
a strategic process that serves as a guide on your journey towards a more sustainable organizational future.
It is therefore designed to help schools to act strategically to achieve their goals and at the same time begin to migrate their overall practice towards a more radical stance in the form of sustainable learning community.
We have learnt, in our work with learning communities over the past two decades, that the process of change is both dynamic and unpredictable, it is a creative process which engages people and has to both inspire and motivate them in their personal and collective efforts if it is to succeed. Whilst we learn along the way that every person’s involvement and contribution is uniquely important, we also learn that we have to continually attend to our overall direction of travel.
As such, we might need to generate a level of awareness within a learning community of a number of elements which are of significance in the overall conceptualization of an ecoliterate community.
The first consideration is for the whole:
System
Understanding the learning community and its relationship to the planet is a vital element in our appreciation and transition to a new form of working as a sustainable learning community. It is a continually renewing and revealing engagement. Our learning in this process is focused upon the deepening of this connectivity and interconnection between self, community and environment. As we grow in our awareness of this, we begin to see the possibilities of such change as new forms of organistion, economy and ecology.
A starting question: What do we mean by sustainable success?
Understanding of possibilities allows us to define success within this system. What is the learning communities vision for success, filtered through the principles of a sustainable society?
Strategy
Not all ideas that we establish through our conversations will integrate with the sustainable principles or with the learning communities goals. Through a process of dialogue (Bohm 1996), and emergent modeling we journey from our current world views to identify the areas of focus we might need to attend to in order to successfully achieve a sustainable form of learning community. This involves letting go of some of the existing organizational actions and structures and letting new ones come along. The main concern here is for the relationships we generate and the continuous attention to the ways in which freedom, choice and participation are nurtured.
Action
With a clear strategy, we can undertake coordinated actions, making connections between different but complementary initiatives that move use closer to a collective goal.
Wouldn’t it be nice!
However, the assumption of collective consensus is to be challenged throughout the process. We know, from experience, that more often than not, what we plan is not we end up with. It is a characteristic of human action in social settings that the dynamics will mean that there is a desire for consensus and an orchestration towards this being interpreted as how things change. Instead of working inside this illusion of change as managed practice, it is much better to generate structures, conditions and skills which are conducive to greater capability to recognize and respond – in our case within our communities of action, interest, place and connection.
This alignment is a starting point for development. Everything we do may be focused on the end game, pedagogy, curriculum, management approaches, liaison with community, resources purchasing, planning activities, but they are all guided by our attention and focus upon to the community capabilities.
We are able to extend these ideas further however. Living systems theorists often comment on the layers within layers of systems (Capra 2002). So too, can our consideration of forms of community - connection, place, action and interest, be extended to examine ways in which these capabilities are developed in the form of specific skills.
Figure four: Ecoliteracy skills
Networking skills: is the awareness of and ability to see one’s actions as part of a network and contributing to the entirety of a dynamic system. Networks enable people to establish multiple pathways to seek relevant connections and interdependencies to support, guide and inform areas of work. All people functioning within an ecologicaly literate community are going to be conscious of, and capable of using the relationships inside a network to further their own and each others’ activity. This echoes Castells (1996) assertion that in the Network Society, institutions become bargaining agencies rather than sites of power. The power resides in networked relationships and the cultural connections through which people and institutions communicate. Castells says that the city is less a place and more ‘a process by which centers of production and consumption of advanced services are connected…’ part of our transitional thinking is therefore focused on the connection capability, how the relationships are nurtured and maintained over time, in effect, how we sustain sustainability.
Connecting skills: is the awareness and ability to function at a micro-level but at the same time understand the dynamic influence that small scale actions have upon the whole activity of the system. This insight is well documented in the recent work of researchers exploring the ways in which viral networks operate – where a set of ideas rapidly gain systemic influence through numerous small scale connections and relationships being sympathetic to similar issues of resonance to their personal situations.
Renewing skill: the awareness and ability to conserve, revise, and reapply resources, ideas, partnerships in such a way as they continually support and reinforce each other.
Emerging skill: the awareness and ability to facilitate learning that is both personal and collective and ensure that this interplay is creative and unfolding all of the time. This has implications for how we might plan, design, manage and maintain initiatives.
Systematising skill: the awareness and ability to enable communities to regulate, self-organise, sustain and function within a dynamic system. This includes the ability to see the system as a whole and to appreciate the dynamic interplay of elements within that whole.
Tools for ecoliteracy
These are my first attempt at a version of the metrics that serve as the basis of a new formulation of a learning community to meet the needs of an ecologically framed paradigm of reform. It serves as the basis through which I am currently considering the community of action within a sustainable learning community (Clarke forthcoming).
As we see, the interconnect between broadly defined forms of capital (environmental, social, intellectual, financial, etc) framed through a set of interconnected communities of enquiry, focused around learning (communities of place, action, connectedness and interest), and operationalised through an ecoliterate skill set is a starting framework for debate and enquiry into the transition from a managerial to an ecological paradigm.
Figure five: A cycle of interdependent capabilities
We do not know, at the start of this journey, what the sequence of actions will look like, nor do we know the overall shape of what we will create together. However, each decision we make on the journey is guided by a clear understanding of the definition of success –a sustainable learning community. As we systematically apply the conceptual principles of our sustainable learning community to our day-to-day practice we enhance our awareness of the practicalities required to create a sustainable learning community.
Grateful thanks to Tony Kelly, Jane Reed, Chris May, Ian Smith and many colleagues who respond to the ongoing posts at my blog www.sustainableretreat.blogspot.com
References
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