The Ecology of Learning

Sustainability, Lifelong Learning and Everyday Life

John Blewitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781844072033
• eBook ISBN: 9781136535994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Economics

Your house is flooded by 'unseasonal' heavy rain. What do you learn from this experience? Do you shrug your shoulders and call your insurer? Or do you choose to learn about climate change, switch to renewable energy and lobby politicians? In this insightful book, John Blewitt explores the possibilities for developing a sustainable society through 'lifelong learning' that is, learning that happens in everyday environments and activities as diverse as shopping, community, 'edutainment', information and communication technology, the internet, broadcasting, people's experience of place and space, green building, social networks and consumer culture.

Drawing on a range of sociological, anthropological and educational studies as well as new research, The Ecology of Learning is ideal for educators, teachers, corporate trainers and consultants working to integrate environmental education, sustainability and innovation in non-traditional learning situations. The coverage is extensive, with an accessible but informed engagement with both theory and practice and a wide range of examples. Throughout, the voices, stories and experiences of many people are used to illustrate the ways people may reshape our understanding of learning and sustainability.

1
Learning as Sustainability

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of learning and sustainability from a sociological and anthropological perspective and identifies a number of issues that will be explored more fully in later chapters. It comprises the following sections:

• On sustainability;

• On learning, lifelong;

• On eco-museums;

• On the everyday;

• On affordances and the everyday; and

• On education for sustainable development.

ON SUSTAINABILITY

There has been no shortage of academic and political critiques of the complementary concepts ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’. Some academics play the game of counting the number of definitions, arguing about their inconsistency and then finally offering one of their own. Strict purveyors of disciplinary truth and rigour may view the concepts as utopian or incapable of being put into practice, while others see inherent and irreconcilable contradictions particularly in the tension between ‘development’ and ‘sustainable’. But the idea that future social and economic development needs to take place within the limits of the Earth's ecosystem capacity and that it includes a proper consideration of social justice, poverty, political democracy and so forth is eminently sensible to many (Langhelle, 1999; Robinson, 2004). Robinson's commentary (2004) is concerned with the critical contradictions within the concept: there is a focus on growth and development, this much appreciated by governments and business, on the one hand and ecological sustainability, emphasized by many NGOs, academic environmentalists and activists, on the other. Robinson prefers the term sustainability, which ‘focuses attention where it should be placed, on the ability of humans to continue to live within environmental constraints’ (2004, p370). One of the main reasons why sustainable development and sustainability have generated such a vast number of definitions and criticisms is because they tend to reflect the political and philosophical value bases of those articulating a given definition. For those who want an unambiguous scientific, technical, discipline-specific and/or operationable definition this causes problems, but not for Robinson, who observes:

Diplomats are familiar with the need to leave key terms undefined in negotiation processes and in much the same way the term sustainable development may profit from what might be called constructive ambiguity.

Certainly the plethora of competing definitions in the literature suggests that any attempt to define the concept precisely, even if it were possible, would have the effect of excluding those whose views were not expressed in that definition. (Robinson, 2004, p374)

What is needed and what the constructive ambiguity surrounding the term sustainability can offer is the possibility of integration, synthesis and synergy – of a social learning process that bridges the gaps between the social and ecological, the scientific and spiritual, the economic and the political. Technical fixes are necessary but not sufficient if ecological, economic and social imperatives are to be reconciled. For Robinson, this cannot be done scientifically, only politically – in dialogue and in partnership with sustainability ‘the emergent property of a conversation about what kind of world we collectively want to live in now and in the future.’ Robinson concludes:

I would argue that the equivalent development in the field of sustainability is the recognition that multiple conflicting views of sustainability exist and cannot be reconciled in terms of each other. In other words, no single approach will, or indeed should be, seen as the correct one. This is not a matter of finding out what the truth of sustainability is by more sophisticated applications of expert understanding (the compass and ruler). Instead we are inescapably involved in a world in which there exist multiple conflicting values, moral positions and belief systems that speak to the issue of sustainability. While it is crucial to identify points of empirical disagreement and to resolve those with better research and analysis, the ultimate question is not susceptible to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. What is needed, therefore, is a process by which these views can be expressed and evaluated, ultimately as a political act for any given community or jurisdiction. (Robinson, 2004, p382)

In this way, sustainable development and sustainability may most productively function as a heuristic – that is, as a method or system of education or learning by which a person is enabled to find things out for him/herself and to fully appreciate the contested nature of knowledge, nature, the environment and sustainability (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998).

What is clear, then, is that sustainable development is multidimensional, encompassing social, ecological and economic goals. The notion of sustainable development being a ‘dialogue of values’ (Ratner, 2004) is another useful starting point. Ratner identifies three basic tendencies in sustainable development practice:

1 Sustainable development as technical consensus;

2 Sustainable development as ethical consensus;

3 Sustainable development as a dialogue of values.

Ratner argues (2004, p62) that the sustainability concept is meaningful because it is able to bring differences of belief and opinion, values and conviction into a common field of dialogue and so enhance the potential for agreement on collective action. He also finds it necessary to distinguish between trivial or populist conceptualizations and truly meaningful ones:

When advocates use the term [sustainable development] to mean ‘sustained growth’, ‘sustained change’ or simply ‘successful’ development, then it has little meaning, especially when development is considered as growth in material consumption. More meaningful interpretations are multidimensional, often distinguishing among social goals (including justice, participation, equality, empowerment, institutional sustainability, cultural integrity, etc.), ecological goals (including biodiversity preservation, ecosystem resilience, resource conservation, etc.), and economic goals (including growth, efficiency and material welfare). Such a multidimensional notion represents the mainstream in analysis and advocacy of sustainable development … It recognizes ecosystem integrity as fundamental to the productive activities on which human society and economy depend, acknowledges ecological limits to growth in the consumption of resources, and assumes that the distinct goals of sustainability sometimes converge in practice and other times require difficult trade-offs. (Ratner, 2004, pp53–4)

Understood as a dialogue and a heuristic, sustainable development is therefore process orientated. It is fashioned, promoted, communicated, created, learned, produced and reproduced through what we do, how we work, and what we make, trade and create, ranging from the micro, the immediate and the everyday, to the macro, the long term and the exceptional. Sustainable development and its objective, sustainability, will come about through learning and reflecting on everyday assumptions, habits of behaviour, structures of feeling and expectation. This learning will take place in schools, colleges and universities. More importantly it will take place in the home, on the high street, at the workplace, when on holiday, watching television, in the garden, putting the rubbish out for recycling, getting the train, talking with friends, surfing the net and so on.

ON LEARNING, LIFELONG

The concept of lifelong learning has been around for quite a time and throughout its existence has been subject to a number of debates, discussions and disputes. It is, to use a term loved by academics, a contested concept, harbouring within it a number of contradictions, approaches and potential applications. The international educator Ernesto Gelpi saw it as potentially both emancipatory and repressive, rooted in structures and experiences of production and consumption, focusing on the needs of marginalized groups and the reproduction of the market economy (Gelpi, 1979). Contemporary educators such as John Field (2000) and Frank Coffield (1999, 2000) have been highly critical of the economic and vocational focus of contemporary lifelong learning policy and practice that has emerged from governmental and international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Britain's Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Richard Taylor, for many years the head of the School of Continuation at the University of Leeds (before it closed in 2005) and now at Cambridge, has called for a radical reform of higher education and the protection of a less instrumental, less vocationally orientated adult education (1996; Taylor et al, 2002). Despite all this, the significance of lifelong learning as a concept with a significant social side, a cultural resonance and a clear aim to empower as well as enlighten is far less instrumental and far broader than government-imposed funding and attainment targets that are narrowly conceived to be almost exclusively economistic. Learning is an inevitable aspect of all spheres of our lives from the everyday to the highly specialized and tightly prescribed. We cannot survive without being able to learn or without learning – how to cook, where to find the coffee in the local supermarket, how to get a job, what to put in to the new recycling bins, how to live more sustainably. The local authority may have just recently provided us all with colour-coded recycling bins in an attempt to reduce the amount of consumer waste going to landfill, but what goes where? Why not all plastics? Where to put the big brown monstrosity without it being an eyesore? Is it collected next Tuesday or is it Wednesday?

The EU has articulated the notion of lifelong learning as encompassing formal, non-formal and informal practices (CEC, 2000). Learning is recognized as taking place throughout society – not simply in the formal institutions of schools, colleges and universities, but also in community groups, in the supermarket, on the allotment, in front of the television, at the workplace, while plugged into the computer, when on holiday, while visiting a museum, city farm or community garden, or while enjoying a walk through the countryside. Informal learning in everyday life is perhaps a major key to unlocking the door to a more sustainable world. Computer games are fast becoming bigger business than Hollywood and computer simulations are an important part of the formal learning environment for many professions, from architects and planners to biologists and the US Marines. Games are also an important element in the everyday leisure and learning experiences of many children and young people. But you don't have to be a geek or ten to be into the new media technologies. Gee (2003) has persuasively demonstrated the learning potential of this emergent medium (discussed later in this book). Learning is also a key to how individuals manage the increasingly evident economic and ecological risks, uncertainties and complexities, which often seem beyond our control: it is not obviously our responsibility but they nonetheless shape our lives, hopes, expectations and anxieties. Most young adults today will have more than one career, many jobs will be short term, technology changes rapidly, weather patterns render idyllic holiday destinations less predictably idyllic, we may have to get our drinking water from standpipes in the summer and deal with floods in the winter, and what we eat may be slowly poisoning us. We need to learn to do different things, or the same things but differently. Learning is important if people are to care about themselves, about others and about the world as it is now and as it may be in the future.

Although not many people seem to be talking about it at the bus stop, in the pub or indeed in the universities, we have now entered the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, 2005–2014. This global initiative establishes a broad context for learning about sustainability. It is being promoted internationally by the United Nations, to some extent also by national governments, and in many ways comes just at the right time as more people than ever before are currently attuned to the wider issues of climate change, renewable energy, free and fair trade, human rights, animal welfare, social exclusion, civil and political liberties, ethical consumption, and the ‘risk society’. As weather patterns become increasingly severe or volatile, with spring appearing earlier and earlier, images of hurricanes filling the television news, the price of a barrel of oil reaching record highs, petrol and diesel becoming fuels of the past, and debates over the efficacy of renewable energy and the necessity of nuclear power resurrecting fears that had been buried years ago, the UN's initiative is more important than ever. There is a need for educational practitioners in the formal sectors to engage with the sustainability agenda but, as the framers of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development make clear, that is not going to be enough:

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is for everyone, at whatever stage of life they are. It takes place, therefore, within a perspective of lifelong learning, engaging all possible learning spaces, formal, non-formal and informal, from early childhood to adult life. ESD calls for a re-orientation of educational approaches – curriculum and content, pedagogy and examinations. Spaces for learning include non-formal learning, community-based organizations and local civil society, the workplace, formal education, technical and vocational training, teacher training, higher education educational inspectorates, policy-making bodies, and beyond. (UNESCO, 2005, p6; their emphasis)

Conceived in this way ESD embraces many spheres, approaches and arenas. It's not just about learning one discipline or one trade or knowing when to smile or be polite in public. It requires a holistic understanding of the world and the place of humans within it; it has a powerful ethical purpose; it is dialogic; it is about learning to learn how to make sense of the world around us and within us. The American educator Jack Mezirow has largely concerned himself with transformative aspects of learning. A ‘meaning scheme’, he writes, ‘is the particular knowledge, beliefs, value judgements and feelings that become articulated in an interpretation’ of an experience (Mezirow, 1991, p44). This schema is based on a ‘meaning perspective’, which is a broader structure of assumptions derived from previous experiences enabling us to assimilate, make sense of and transform our new experiences. These perspectives offer us criteria by which we can judge whether something is good or bad, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong, true or false, appropriate or inappropriate, sustainable or unsustainable. Mezirow does not like to separate the intellectual from the knowing, the cognitive from the intuitive, cultural or affective dimensions of learning and perception. For Mezirow, transformative learning is when our meaning schemes (specific attitudes, beliefs and attitudes) and meaning perspectives change as a result of experience and self-reflection. Perspective transformation is the process whereby people become critically aware of how and why their assumptions constrain the way they perceive, understand and feel about the world. It involves the changing of more or less habitual expectations, making possible more inclusive or integrative perspectives and the capability of making choices to act upon these new modes of understanding. Perspective transformation can occur slowly through gradual changes in attitudes and beliefs or through a shattering experience, a ‘disorientating dilemma’, which may be highly personal or be prompted by an eye-opening discussion, film, book or article that seriously contradicts previously held assumptions. These changes may be painful, involving the questioning of long-held beliefs and personal values; they may even challenge a person's sense of self and personal identity. Mezirow (1991, p193) notes:

Social movements can significantly facilitate critical self-reflection. They can precipitate or reinforce dilemmas and legitimate alternate meaning perspectives. Identifying with a cause larger than oneself is perhaps the most powerful motivator to learn. In turn, people who have undergone perspective transformations can bring great power to social movements. (Mezirow, 1991, p193)

The importance of values and experience are evident in many environmental justice campaigns, illustrated graphically by Lois Gibbs, who founded the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association of Niagara Falls in 1978. This small working-class community near Niagara Falls was the site of an unfinished canal, where between 1942 and 1952 the Hooker Electric Company dumped nearly 22,000 tonnes of chemicals. In the end, Hooker filled in the canal and sold the land to the town for US$1. An elementary school was built and opened in 1955 and a neighbourhood community established itself around it but by the mid 1970s over 200 toxic chemicals had begun appearing in the schoolyard and in the basements of people's homes. Residents of Love Canal experienced an extremely large number of sometimes fatal health problems, including cancer, epilepsy, asthma, birth defects and miscarriages. It was this experience, particularly as it impacted on her as a young mother, that transformed the attitudes, values and behaviour of Lois Gibbs. She initiated and led a campaign and has since become a very active environmental justice campaigner in the US. In an interview with Sharon Livesey (2003), she described her feelings thus:

I was worried about my kids. I just love them. I pride myself on being a really good mom. Especially after Missy developed the blood disorder, I was convinced that I would lose them. The tears and the anxiety. And I was so angry. And I think it was those two passions. To think that somebody had made that decision to allow us to move in to that house and live there! And then to have that report come out and say that we weren't worthy of being moved or helped in any way. They made a conscious decision that it was OK to make my child sick. This was on purpose, and that's the part that made me so angry and still does today when I go and sit with these folks in their living rooms, for example, in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. People know what is happening and they have chosen to let it happen. And people who know better.

However, not everyone takes on a leadership role or feels sufficiently motivated, empowered or certain that they can make a difference, or even try to make a difference.

The Danish educator Knud Illeris sees learning as being made up of three fundamental dimensions, namely:

1 A cognitive process – an acquisitive process comprising both intellectual and behavioural learning;

2 An emotional or psychodynamic process involving psychological energy, feelings, emotions, attitudes and motivations;

3 A social process – learning can only really take place as an interaction between an individual in his/her surroundings, ie the historical, societal and, one might add, environmental conditions of existence. (Illeris, 2002)

Learning just doesn't take place on its own, in isolation, without someone doing the learning, although occasionally it can occur in quite mysterious ways. We do think about things, reflect on experience, search for answers or that fair trade coffee, which is inexplicably not on the shelf as it usually is. Learning often takes place following or during critical reflection that feeds back into ourselves, rearticulating our experiences and our understanding of those experiences. Some learning is simply an accumulation of facts or experiences easily assimilated into what is already there. On the other hand, a disturbing or disorientating experience may not be so easily assimilated. Some learning and conservation organizations intentionally offer a disorientating experience to their visitors, although this is by no means common. On a visit to Jersey Zoo (now known as the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust), just before viewing the great apes the visitor is invited to look at photographs and articles depicting and describing the ‘bushmeat’ trade: photographs of dismembered, decapitated or cooked apes and reports of menus in fashionable cosmopolitan restaurants serving this delicacy. Then the visitor walks round the perimeter of the large open enclosure where the gorillas lounge about eating their lettuces, picking their noses, grooming their young or simply yawning in the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Boxes, Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Learning as Sustainability
• 2 Sustainability and the Practice of Everyday Life
• 3 Learning through Leisure
• 4 Building Sustainable Neighbourhoods and Communities
• 5 Social Learning and Community Action
• 6 The Media, Sustainability and Learning
• 7 Reschooling Society
• References
• Index