creating - sustainable -(learning) - communities

Our culture is now based on the exclusion of any idealism. We’ve convinced ourselves that the greatest ideal is not having one...We are predicated on being non-committal. It borders on chaos because we’re building communities, if they can be called that, which have nothing in common. Our universalism is based on difference, on my identity being different from yours. We delight in diversity to such an extent that it becomes the only definition of what unites us. Tobias Jones (2008) Utopian dreams

This book has emerged from my work with schools over the last decade. During this time I have observed schools grappling with a constant barrage of reform. Whilst the reform might come from central government of a singular political persuasion, it has singularly failed, as with previous efforts, to demonstrate any coherent and consistent philosophy of education, nurture and learning. Instead, experience tells us that educational reform is fragmented, piecemeal, arbitrary, and regularly linked to ministers who have parliamentary careers in mind far more than educational enrichment, who move on to other jobs with alarming speed suggesting that the education brief is only a short term tenure and leave their legacy in classrooms across the country in the form of half-baked schemes and programmes which collide with their previous incumbents ideas. It has, for many, managed to generate a climate where people on the front line feel exploited, undervalued, manipulated by management and bullied into fitting with a system that they often report as being out of step with both the students that they work with, and without any core philosophy, any compelling vision of the future.
We seem to have created an educational wilderness, where as Jones (2008) says, we have communities with nothing in common, where individualism is so embedded and institutionalized that it has eroded any semblance of policy of care, idealism, or commitment to each other, and this is eating away at the true values of service, interdependence and relationships.
The climate is muddied even further by counter perspectives on schools. It is true to say that there remains a resilient faith in human-scale practices in many individual school communities. Scratch the surface and in many cases you quickly recognize schools managing a vibrant internal conversation about living, connection, creativity, possibility. My suggestion is that they manage this despite of, and not because of, the prevailing externally defined conditions and parameters of performance. In effect, their internal culture is a counter-culture functioning for the purpose of maintenance of what the school defines as its own ethos, but perhaps more poignantly, it represents a form of resistance and protest to the prevailing order.
There is therefore something slightly adrift in this post-industrial period. We are living through what commentators often describe as a ‘period of turbulence’. That is, a time when a lot of things seem to be blurred at the edges and previous certainties are not quite as certain as they once were. The idea of School, and the whole school system from cradle to grave , is clearly changing as expectations of what they do and how they do it as they are modified by the socio-cultural context in which school functions. Whereas even a decade ago we could look across the school system and see a consistent pattern of organization and structure, we now see a plethora of different school models which have generated new and different configurations of relationships between students, parents, teachers, governors, local authorities and government.
On the one hand these restructurings represent something of the state of the nation and the consequence of the economic zeitgeist of individualism and choice. On the other they indicate a singular lack of clarity about the nature and purpose of school. Out of all this complex mix, there remains a common denominator at play – schooling. Underneath all of the reform, there remains a fundamental commitment to the idea that school, as an institution, is not questioned, and that its function by and large remains intact, despite the contextual changes happening beyond the school gates. We might have many versions of school available, from Trusts to Academies, the truth is that the core technology remains fundamentally the same.
Pearce (1998) calls this unfailing commitment to the idea of school, a ‘radical denial.’ Our denial is pathological, and attends to treating the failure of small elements in the belief that the system is intact, rather than asking about the system as a whole and its continual need for attention being demonstrable evidence of failure at a much wider level. We have what the 14th century Spanish Sufi, Ibn Arabi called ‘our enormous capacity for self-deception’ managing our desire collectively to maintain things as they are and to carefully modify them, and yet what we have may not be correctable. For example, if all our education system is for is to produce efficient consumers and workers, and if the economic model was stable and predictable enough to guarantee that the output of consumers and workers could be accommodated within the model, then, perhaps, simply in utilitarian terms, the current operational approach would be legitimate. However, neither scenarios are true, we deceive ourselves into thinking that these are the realities of our system.
I hold a similar view to that of Pearce. My suggestion is that we need to look again at what we are doing. When a system is completely out of alignment with the world it is meant to connect with, it is not enough to simply play with the existing arrangements and hope they will reconnect. Our immediate response might be to find and then introduce a new approach that is more productive and to eradicate the earlier approach and start to think about what we might want to do next. However, this instrumental approach is not really productive and it is not what I think will happen. Instead, I think we are better served thinking about the system and how a system changes. As the nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine says, as long as a system is stable, or at an equilibrium, you can't change it, but as it moves toward disequilibrium and falls into chaos then the slightest bit of coherent energy can bring it into a new structure. What we are exploring in this discussion are elements of a larger whole, what we will find, is that things which attract to each other have the potential to generate a new coherence. We don’t need to orchestrate a transition, it will come anyway, we need to understand what that transitional material looks like.
Let us think about a form of education where we educate people to meet the stage of their lives in which they find themselves, an education that sustains them by equipping them for ‘being’. As Pearce says,
…the three-year-old is not an incomplete five-year-old, but a complete, total and whole three-year-old. If a child is given all the nurturing to be here as a three year old, they'll be the perfect five year old later on, and so on (Pearce 1998).
Our commodified view of education is founded on the bizzare notion that we are preparing a child for life, boxing up future needs as we ‘accelerate’ their learning and preparation for their future lives. This generates a disconnect between their current reality and some other place in time utterly out of their influence. Pearce continues, ‘The idea that we are preparing the child for life, or for the future, is a terrible travesty which betrays every facet of the human being. We don't prepare for life, we equip the child with the means to live fully at whatever stage they are in. The idea we're going to train a child at seven to get a good job at age twenty-seven is a travesty of profound dimension.
The side effects of education as preparation for life make profoundly disturbing reading and yet remain largely unreported, particularly in the mental health of our young people. Prescott (2002) in his study of societal violence reported that ‘every 78 seconds a child is attempting suicide... It is this kind of terrible despair we breed in our children when we don't see the difference between preparing and equipping our children for life.’
Equipping as learning simply connects the person to the situations in which they find themselves. There are some important messages we can take from the idea, in response to the institutional view of education, and in the location and purpose behind that education.
First, we have to realize that education begins in the womb and that the first three years of life are when ninety percent of it takes place. Secondly, there is little point wasting effort and energy trying to bring down existing institutions, it is more productive to put effort and energy into doing what must be done for as many children as can immediately be reached. This means looking to the tangible and real needs of a child, in a family, or in a neighbourhood and then responding to that need.


The more I spent time in discussion of future design of school environment and culture, working with students and teachers on how they might best create conditions that helped them to live the more obvious it was that the way we do things inside schools was as likely to impede than it was to enhance the potential of many people who turned up there every day. There just seems something incongruous about a narrative of educational transmission in a world where creative connection is so very possible.
The overwhelming effect of this is a sense of alienation. Somehow we need to reconnect, redesign, rebuild, and above all reconceive our future together. As the prologue in the Hannover Principles so powerfully suggests;
Human society needs to aspire to an integration of its material, spiritual and ecological elements. Current technologies, processes and means tend to separate these facets rather than connect them. Nature uses the sun's energy to create interdependent systems in which complexity and diversity imply sustainability. In contrast, industrialized society extracts energy for systems designed to reduce natural complexity. The challenge for humanity is to develop human design processes which enable us to remain in the natural context. Almost every phase of the design, manufacturing, and construction processes requires reconsideration. Linear systems of thought, or short-term programs which justify ignorant, indifferent, or arrogant means are not farsighted enough to serve the future of the interaction between humanity and nature. We must employ both current knowledge and ancient wisdom in our efforts to conceive and realize the physical transformation, care and maintenance of the Earth. (Hannover principles 2000)

The need to reconnect, redesign and realign our actions generates a series of challenges concerning the relationship with self, organization, and systems raises questions. How might we best move forward, from where we are, to something else? The idea of deterministic change never appealed to me, and a decade of educational reform proves one thing if nothing else, that what you want is not what you get. So there seems to be something to learn methodologically about reform that might be valuable to capture and address within a conversation about ‘future’ school. Equally, there is something about the idea of the concept of school and the reality of school. By this I mean the concept of learning things, building upon existing knowledge and using this in productive ways as a resource through which we can develop, both personally and as a civilization. At the same time, where this happens, the locus of learning, is clearly no longer locked to any one place. So schooling is at once local and universal. We need, I think, to explore that a little more.
And then there is that whole idea of purpose, or perhaps we might say, fitness for purpose. I do not mean this in a utilitarian way, I am not remotely interested in the idea of using schools to generate the next wave of call-centre fodder. Instead, I am interested in the purpose of education in this time of turbulence, where certainties are not certain. What might we draw from such a question and how might we use what we find out to inform and influence a future school concept? So the purpose of school is a question I want to consider.
With these ideas in mind I want to sketch out first what I mean by the title of the book creating sustainable (learning) communities.
Creating – I am interested in the idea that all human endeavour is a part of a bigger, creative process. This process is constant, it is unfolding, it is dynamic and it is energizing, it resembles artistic creativity. Margaret Mead once said, "No education that is not founded on art will ever succeed." Steiner education does not teach art – it is not a subject. Instead, art is the means by which everything is taught and learned. I want to emphasise creativity in this way as a form of "high play" and only through high play does real learning take place. It is a centrally important part of the philosophy of education as equipping to deal with real life, promoting freedom and choice. Any other form of education is conditioning to another person’s employ, another's motive, another's idea of life.
Sustainable – I will first refer to a section in the Hanover Principles (2000 p4).
The concept of sustainability has been introduced to combine concern for the well-being of the planet with continued growth and human development. Though there is much debate as to what the word actually suggests, we can put forth the definition offered by the World Commission on Environment and Development: "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
In its original context, this definition was stated solely from the human point of view. In order to embrace the idea of a global ecology with intrinsic value, the meaning must be expanded to allow parts of nature to meet their own needs now and in the future. With this in mind, I am interested in the idea that all education is environmental education (I will go into more detail later), and that a critical function of any educative process is creating the capability to respond appropriately to the natural world to ensure that our personal and our collective impact upon that world is sympathetic rather than destructive of the planet and its resources.
Learning – I am interested in the locus of learning, first of all, who does the learning? Second, why does it have to be within an institution called school? Are we now, finally, in a transitional position where our work takes place both in buildings called schools but also elsewhere? What does this do to our ideas of curriculum? What might we need to learn, for what purpose, and how might we best go about learning these things?
Communities – I am interested in re-colonising the idea of community to mean two things. One, a geographically bound group of people who may or may not have commonly held interests but who find themselves in a specific locale – such as our current version of school. Second, a group of people who share ideas and interests but who may not be in the same geosphere – possibly our ‘future school’.
There seems to be something to explore in the interplay between communities of place and communities of practice (Wenger 1998), how these inter-relate, and what we might do to attempt to understand and develop our use of the interplay through the use of new technologies which in turn can influence cultural practices – the way we might do things inside our geo-physically bound communities. How we engage with these ideas seems to be important, as our forms of action, interest, the places where we undertake such activity and the manner in which we engage are all informed either explicitly or implicitly through the principles which guide our lives.
In the context of this work, the principles from the Hanover project have provided me with a way of engaging in the conversation of sustainable community:
1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.
2. Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.
3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.
4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to co-exist.
5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.
6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.
7. Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.
8. Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.

So this is a starting point for our work. The Hannover principles are an all encompassing way of envisioning the way we might connect with each other and with our world. Whilst they work on a general level, I think there are ways of taking these principles further, which in turn enable us to have something of an outline sketch of what we mean by sustainable education. I will come back to this at the end of the book in the form of a framework as I think that such a device provides practitioners with a way of exploring many of these ideas with colleagues. However, for the moment, I want to play out three dimensions of sustainable education which connect with what I have already alluded to in the title- creating sustainable learning communities.
I want to suggest that in achieving a goal of creating a sustainable learning community we have to succeed beyond, between and within our idea of school:
Beyond
• Holistic – an acknowledgement that we educate the whole person, education nourishes the environmental capital (Clarke 2009), human capital, social capital, spiritual capital, manufactured capital and financial capital (Porritt 2009).
• Ethical - we educate to ensure that we extend our care and our concerns beyond the present and into the future
• Innovative – we educate in the confidence that our personal and collective efforts will seek to integrate and generate new insights
• Equitable – we educate with an awareness that resources are finite, and that we have a duty of care for each other and for the planet

Between
• Connected – we educate to help us to see the relational patterns that inform change, from local to global, from individual to group, from living being to planet, from past to present to future, from micro to macro, from collective to self, from real to virtual
• Systemic – we educate to see the dynamics of systems, of seasons, of the interrelatedness of ecology, of the interdependence of one system upon and within another
• Contextualised – we educate to recognize the place we play in our own environment, and how we influence our surroundings by the choices we make
• Critical – we educate to help us to not take the world as given, instead we develop the capability to enquire, deconstruct, confront and reconstruct
Within
• Emerging – we educate to construct an operational approach to organization which is generative, is deeply aware of the possibility of change
• Living systems – we educate to illustrate and understand how we are part of a wider integrated living system, and that we naturally move through phases of renewal, development, conservation and creative destruction both personally and collectively in our relationships with each other and with the planet
• Process – we educate with a deep appreciation of process as a way of constructing meaning and establishing pedagogy, everyone is a learner, reflective practice is or core methodology, our learning is participatory and grounded
• Natural – we use nature as both teacher and guide, we take every opportunity to connect our learning to natural examples and illustrations
• Freedom – we educate to ensure that every person understands and celebrates freedom, this is exemplified through choice, learning styles, learning methods, and is grounded in dialogue, participation and community
• Interdependence – we educate to see the fundamental of interdependence, we all rely upon each other and we all rely upon our planetary environment for survival
• Creativity – we educate to encourage and nurture the innate creative potential of every person
This I think, sets the scene for this work. It is work which will scope one way forward with the venture of education, a new idea of school, and I hope it will begin to illustrate in more meaningful and connected ways what we might aspire towards in the form of a sustainable community. It is one way forward, it is deliberate in a) being idealistic, b) being committal, c) seeking forms of interdependence d) seeking pattern and coherence e) recognizing difference but understanding that there are mutually held needs. The work recognizes that there are many other ways forward that are equally possible, but without discussion and challenge we struggle to proceed beyond the narrow confines of someone else’s agenda for reform, so I will examine this work in the spirit of enquiry and with an interest in the art of the possible.