World Heutagogy Day 2019
26th September 2019
How Can we Green Our Learning?
As preparation for World Heutagogy Day on Green Learning we have been discussing a range of issues that emerge when we ask the question how can we green our learning?
#GreenMyLearning Because I have been involved in how I can green my own learning for 40 years, basically once I left a school system that wanted to force me into studying ONLY those parts of its own subject-taxonomy that it deemed appropriate for the me they thought they new (good at Maths useless at much else, except the loneliness of long-distancing running), I thought I’d reflect on what I had learnt about greening education. More in Green My Learning
Green My Reading; In fact because my Mum had been a librarian I had gone to the library most days from the age of 7-10 and learnt to choose my own books and follow my own interests as, back in the 1950s, primary school mostly didn’t set Homework. I thought homework was the learning activities I freely chose, and often invented (games) for myself. I mostly read books, and whilst few were green (see Green My Reading) I did learn to follow my interests and create my own folksonomy of learning.
Learning Outside School; Most of my learning was from listening to music, watching films (we had no TV) chatting with friends and, most importantly “going to play outside” with no pre-determined agenda. It was an age of few cars and not much television, from which I benefitted massively. I thought they was a “lightness on the edge of town called nature and I headed towards it. More on Green My Thinking
Green My Resources; I learnt to buy resources that fed my interests and so broadened it, unlike in the education system, and deepened my understanding where I chose to deepen it, and not because a forthcoming exam demanded it. In the case of exams the cramming of information to be regurgitated under pressure is the best way to make sure that you forget it by next year; it’s not useful and the brain forgets anything flagged up as not useful (Weizenbaum).
Green My Library; I’ve been these blogs and running sessions in New Cross Learning a volunteer library in London. My view was that the school climate strike would find that schools would not change their curriculum and so they would have to organise their own green learning in our “street-corner universities” However, just as Universities are not green neither are libraries. So I have been acting on #GreenMyLibrary by donating books each week, such as Autogeddon by Heathcote Williams and The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. You can do that too if you Create a Green Resources Hub somewhere your resources can be shared and discussions started. Start a green book club and meet regularly to discuss its ideas
Green My Institutionbecause I did a Masters degree with a research thesis on the Environmental Impact of Computing which was framed by the question “Is there a Green IT strategy?” which researched how to both green technology use and green the institution. I introduced what I had learnt, eco-management, recycling, green awareness and more through the development of green policies at Lewisham College where I worked and green partnerships with London Borough of Lewisham. This resulted in both a New Deal for the Environment grant for the Borough and the development of the Creekside Environmental Education Centre whose building was the only one in London that met IOC Sustainability Development standards and so was in the London 2012 Olympic bid.
Introduce Green Governance;These successes apart the single most important factor in Greening My Learning was to introduce a Green Governor at Lewisham College, certainly a first in the FE College sector in the UK. This meant that ALL college policies were reviewed by an environmental expert, Professor Shirley Ali Khan co-founder of Forum for the Future. Without top-level strategic review of all college policies everything else is piecemeal and ad-hoc. Eco-management also meant that the college had to publish its environmental performance every year for public scrutiny. More on Green Governance
Green My Curriculumor Teaching Green, which I did for many years, is not easy for this reason. You, the teacher, have to write the course, or unit, submission, first and take it through a curriculum approval process first. Most teachers can’t be bothered, or perhaps find the overhead to getting this done too onerous, or with too many inspection barriers in the way. Luckily I started teaching in the USA where this is a rigorous, quality-controlled, but regular process so I was use to writing my own curriculum. As I developed my approach to teaching as “brokering learning” I wrote the Environmental Impact of Technology into my Social Impact of Computing course and learnt how to teach this. Actually you only need to teach about Product Lifecycle Analysis of any product to understand its environmental impact. Doing this with plastic would solve the current single use problem, but no one talks about this. More on Teaching Green As I ask in the Learning is Changing we must recognise the original thinking of our learners…
Green My Research; Greta Thunberg has called for schools to change their curriculum, that we should listen to the science and that environmental scientists will tell us how to save the world; like green superheroes perhaps? Whilst I agree that governments should accept the IPCC report and act on Climate Change I don’t think that “green research” is solely the province of “environmental scientists” as we need a more holistic approach than that. CoPIRG is one of the greenest research organisations in the world, in that environmental issues are on their research agenda, and it is a Public Interest Research Group not an academic research group, with a subject-discipline interest. They are also based in Boulder, Colorado, which boasts that it is the worlds greenest town, certainly in terms of by-laws and its self-imposed rules it is. I was a Governor at CoPirg and I think we need to develop a new socially accountable form of research group, possibly a Collaborative Learning Environment and Research group; making things CLEaR… As we say “Context is Queen” (or Folksonomy Unites Collective Knowledge perhaps?)
In Green Heutagogy next week we will look at Reduce ReUSE ReCycle in Education as pioneered by Vijaya Khanu Bote in Andhara Pradesh India, with some simple guidelines for teachers on Teaching Green. More on World Heutagogy Day 26th September 2019 #GreenMyLearning in the slides below.
Ihave, actually, “greened my institution” once before. And I recently worked with an EU project on what the “Ecological Transitions” of an institution to being “green” might look like. They’ve both effectively withered on the vine of our absolute indifference about doing anything green now that we’ve been redefined as greedy consumers “buying is good.” Green My Learning might be difficult, but one person, however small, can make a difference for themselves or, in the case of Greta Thunberg, seemingly large. But to Green My Institution (other than as a marketing ploy like Goldsmiths College in 2019) is much harder to do because most people in the Institution need to positively agree to a process of greening the institution, or at the very minimum, to not actively disagree with it; and mostly they will leave it to others to be green on their behalf.
So, if I have “Greened My Institution” once before what did I actually do, and what have I learnt since 1989 about how we might Green My Learning Institution?
Firstly, I started with my Masters research thesis on “Is there a Green IT Strategy” written in 1989 for City University looking at the issue of whether, as businesses increasingly came to use computers as part of their business strategy, that process could be both green in itself and part of a larger process of “greening the business.” Actually it was clear that you could NOT not green the use of technology without greening the business first. To Green My Institution we needed ecological values, at least sustainable development values, to be a core value of the business. Secondly I took on a post at my then institution, Lewisham College, which was the ex-officio “Chair of the Green Committee” so that I had a formal work role which was concerned with how green my institution was. I consciously reconstituted the membership and we drew up a fresh green policy, one element of which was to have a Green Week promoting green values in the college and across the London Borough of Lewisham. Thirdly I also got lucky, really lucky. Our local MP (Lewisham-Deptford) was Joan Ruddock who was, in 1996 and 1997, the Labour Shadow Minister for the Environment. Even better Jill Goddard was leading on Environment issues for Lewisham Council and organised a number of wonderful local projects. We put together a New Deal for the Environment bid (a #GreenNewDeal as it is now rebranded in 2019) in 1997 which lead to Park User Groups and wild “ecological” areas in Lewisham Parks. We also set up the Creekside Environmental Education Trust and built the Creekside Centre in Deptford Creekside. In Lewisham from 1997-2000 I could both think green and act green; you need colleagues, comrades, friends and like-minded people going green. Additionally Lewisham has an active Local Agenda 21 committee implemented the recommendations of Rio 1989 (think Paris 2015 only 25 years earlier). Put another way my working context was green.
Fourthly, perhaps the critical element, you need to adopt a green eco-management standard like emas or ISO 14001 so that organisational “green” behaviour becomes embedded in everyday practice within the institution. Perhaps a “green institution” needs two elements, it’s form and its function. A well-managed green institution provides a skeleton, a platform, from which the institution may evolve into having a green purpose. In Working Greener Ralston and Church argue for Sustainable Work Action Groups co-ordinating organisational change across the institution. Fifthly, and probably the really critical element in a stakeholder based institution like an FE College or University or public limited company is that it is (controlled) by a governance committee so, above all, you need a Green Governor. At Lewisham College we managed to both Establish the post of Green Governor, who would then review EVERY policy decision for its environmental consequences, and appoint Professor Shirley Ali Khan, perhaps the most green educationalist in the University sector in 1998. In this formulation the heart of the institution becomes green and can pump green blood around the institution so that not only is the classroom, or lecture theatre, workshop or laboratory green but the practices that are being carried out within them are environmental. Learners need to turn up to green buildings, run by green managers within which their green learning can take place. How do we “green my building”?
Well I’ve been involved in that with the Creekside Trust where, between 1997 and 2002 we built the only building in London that met the Sustainable Development standard of the International Olympic Committee, and so became part of the successful London 2012 bid for the Olympics. More on Creekside
Green my institution SUMMARY 1. committed actors taking responsibility, 2. Green Governance, 3. Green Policy 4. Green Eco-management quality processes 5. Sustainable Work Action Groups 6. Green “technology” 7. Green Buildings 8. Sympathetic actors in the community, 9. Get Lucky…
Green my Institution with ICT guidelines from 2007 (Fred & Nigel at Becta);
“Environmental sustainability is a key factor in driving long-term planning across the organisation. Developing learning programmes and services and compliance with eco-management accreditation programmes is a college goal.
Smart technology is used to control a wide range of functions with criteria used that prioritise the minimisingof environmental impacts.”
“Environmental sustainability issues are a key factor in partnership working and networks.
ICT is used to:
reduce energy consumption
actively manage environmental impact
provide training for stakeholders on behaviours and skills needed to improve long-term environmental impact and release resources
incorporate environmental impact assessment in all planning cycles.”
And Darwin eco-systeme in Bordeaux made a film for our Origin of Spaces #oosEU project about how they green their Co-Working Hub as part of moving to a 21st century digital economy; Enjoy…
The light was ferociously sharp, the green of the bushes preternaturally clear. As we walked across the heath we couldn’t hear a sound; nature was silent. Suddenly, viciously, an angry bee flew straight into my Mums mouth and stung her tongue. We were in Belsen, where Anne Frank had been killed 13 years earlier and nature was still protesting. My silent summer preceded Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by 5 years.
How you think is stimulated by what is around you, starting with your Mum and Dad. My mum, ably de-stung in Celle, loved pop music and ran our local library in Herford and my dad was a sportsman, his Herford cricket team was playing Celle the Sunday we went to Belsen, and he later trained as a teacher. All the skills and ways of thinking that now help define me. We lived on the edge of town and my greatest pleasure as a kid was being told to “go out and play” escaping into the wide green yonder. On the recce, in the fields, in the park, with friends from around the corner and over the hills and far away. Well not so far away, except in our imagination. We are context-responsive beings and we were soaking up everything, leaf green, river blue, mud brown, stone-grey, brick-red and Tarmac black. We were barking up the right trees and we felt fine. My Mum being a librarian meant that I learnt to read a lot in my own time, so I naturally learnt to create my own Folksonomy of reading; not very interesting when I was 8 perhaps, Plato’s Republic beside the swimming pool when I was 15. When I was 9 my Dad trained to be a teacher and he tried out on me all his text books for 15 year-olds, especially in Maths. By time I was 10 I was voluntarily doing lots of homework; reading loads of books, continually problem-solving, by inventing games, and day-dreaming prolifically with an aimless purpose. I had learnt to learn for myself before the pedagogic poison of Grammar School killed off my innate curiosity. Because my Dad was in the British Army, keeping the Empire installed in various colonies around the world, I was forced to travel a lot as a kid. By time I was 4 years old I’d lived for 6 months on ships, including a birthday in the Suez Canal. I have wonderful sea-legs and an affinity for our blue planet. By time I was 16 I’d lived 8 years abroad and 8 years in the UK, was at my 11th school and was a permanent outsider always trying parse the new environment I was trying to fit into. My story HELP! is about trying to do this both successfully and unsuccessfully when I was 14. I did learn how to delineate the values of the host community I was trying to fit into and that walking around (my only remaining physical ability now after M.E.) in the environment, or neighbourhood was both an escape and a release. I survived the crushingly boring hours in classrooms thanks to the ever-expanding presence of pop music in the sixties after the Beatles released Please Please Me. My erratic swerve through various secondary schools meant I arrived in York planning to study A-levels in English, Mathematics and Geography; my three main self-defined interests. Such an obviously sensible inter-disciplinary approach was not allowed in my 495 year-old school and I was told that I had to take Maths, Further Maths and Physics.
My lifeline from this rule-driven world came from being asked to organise the drama competition for my house (Boarders) and being given a dreadful play to direct that wasn’t written by Shakespeare. As a consequence I subsequently wrote and directed further plays and so, accidentally and craftily, stumbled upon the PAH Continuum as a developmental process, through my own improvised practice, some forty years before writing about it formally in the Open Context Model of Learning. Whilst I was playing at growing up during my gap year (working, girlfriends, music), I decided I needed to know more about First Americans, or “red indians” as we called them then, and somehow subscribed to a monthly magazine in Utah called Many Smokes. This introduced me to a very spiritual approach to cosmology that revered nature wholeheartedly. At the same time I was reading Einstein on relativity theory, hoping to study Mathematics and Philosophy later at Uni, and became conscious of the wave/particle duality of nature. I started to think that context affects how we thought and although we have begun to think that the Universe is quantum our thinking rigidly remains within Mechanical societies and hierarchical rule-based orders. We can’t abide chaos yet it continues to shape us… In 1970 I moved to London to be a drummer. As we were given grants to study I planned to use my first year to find similar minds and became a successful drummer in a band with a record deal. Drum kits are large beasts and I knew I had to make a deal with the Students Union to store my drums so I had somewhere to play them. Six weeks of regular practice at 6.30pm meant I become known to the Student Union President Terry Povey as the mad drummer who read James Joyce in maths classes, so he asked me if I wanted to edit the Students newspaper 118. Having denied any knowledge of journalism Terry countered by saying “you must know how to edit a paper; you play the drums and read James Joyce.” Of course Terry was saying that “as the only arts guy in this science institution you’ve all we’ve got.” As I only knew 3 people, all first year classmates, and the Students Union were generally those very mature second years, I heard this as an invite to hang out with the cool guys. I was right, they whisked me off to their favourite Indian restaurant in a sports car, briefed me on the job and paid for my very first Biryani. Result! Ever since then I’ve decided that the wave patterns of serendipity are the best planning tools. However it wasn’t hanging out with the cool guys that changed my thinking, although I did become an habitué of the marvelously diverse “underground” bookshop Compendium in Camden Lock, the then hub of alternative thinking in London.
No! It was that we became involved in the longest occupation of a British HEI and ran it as social anarchist co-operative, built around occupying the canteen for 5 years and running that ourselves as a workers co-operative. Both processes happened accidentally emerging from our practice and constraints, but we learnt from and built upon them, developing an alternative education programme as a work-in. We created a welcoming hearth around which everyone could discuss equally what we were doing and help co-create what we did next. (Which is not to deny that that some people were more equal than others). Then we lost the battle in which we were conjoined with the HEI. I realised that we had been lied to by the Imperial British establishment and its returning colonial administrators (from Rhodesia) who were treating students with the customary racist paternalism they had learnt in the field dealing with local “natives.” I was incensed by this duplicity and realised that I had found the subject I wish to study.
Why does the State perpetuate social injustice whilst proclaiming its belief in social justice?
Guess what? This is not a University subject of study, although it might just be possible to study this very superficially at Ph.D level. Nonetheless I knew the way forward was to study Politics and then Journalism (at that time only available on a Masters degree at Cardiff University) and, like the Sunday Times Insight team, reveal the Profumo-like double standards of the U.K. elites. I would engage in study ONLY to answer the big questions that were infuriating me about life, the universe and British society. My thinking wasn’t very green but oppositional and still influenced by the people around me, and what I gleaned from “underground” thinking at Compendium. We became Situationists and then we all read Blueprint for Survival, written by The Ecologist magazine in January 1972, that argued that future designs for a effective British Isles need to work with the constraints that nature placed upon us; for example no more than 40 million people on the islands. It was the first example of what might be called post-economic thinking I had heard of and read and hoped to stop “the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet”
I had arrived at the first stage of “greening my thinking” by time I was 21 because I had learnt to be context-responsive and learn from all that was around me although, at 21, this was mostly the vast range of amazing people that I kept on meeting, not least by being the editor of a paper who was much younger than its contributors. More next week..
Last week we held a Green My Learning session at New Cross Learning, which was formerly New Cross Library until the government decided that austerity politics requires a quiescent and compliant populace and decided to kill off libraries. Green My Learning is part of David Holloway’s WikiQuals project Learning Without Barriers about making learning open to all…
In 1989 I was working on a Masters Degree in the School of Information Science at City University and, thanks to a supportive supervisor, researched a thesis on Green Paths to the Information Society looking at how we might create an ecologically-sustainable digital economy by 2021. Consequently I have a lot of Green books at home (see above) and was planning to bring many of them to NX Library. However I have M.E. & have great difficulty doing most things, especially carrying weight, so I picked the 3 lightest books and decided to supplement them with books from the libary, however…
THERE ARE NO GREEN BOOKS IN NEW CROSS LIBRARY
Not to be defeated I decided pick some “green” novels, such as those by Ursula Le Guin or Arundhati Roy, but only Thomas Hardy was on offer… In fact I eventually realised that the book choice was governed by a cultural studies filter and so suffered from what I call “pedagogic poison” (with my Heutagogy hat on). I decided that if we want to “Green My Learning” there is a another problem to solve as well; we need to make “green” books (resources) available. If libraries are places where informal learning takes place, or the learning we choose to do because of our personal interests, then if they are not “green” (or anything else alternative) then the options on offer are radically diminished.
Green My Library! So one of many things that we need to do in addressing problems in the Anthropocene is to “green” all the options available to us as we try and make sense of the world. To green my library is probably a more immediately achievable goal than to green my curriculum as the Climate Strike school kids are rightly demanding.
We discovered that in order to #GreenMyLibrary we had to #occupy a shelf in order that we could donate the books that Ian McCleave and I had brought to donate to our local library as you can see…
Green My Curriculum; In her post-Falklands Imperial phase having “smashed the unions” Margaret Thatcher ordered a redesign of the formal education system so that the creativity of “the Sixties never happened again.” The National Curriculum & our high-stakes assessment education system which values A-Levels and Oxbridge above all means that education policy is a massive dead weight that has frozen English Education in 1986. But learning is changing…
Brokering Learning teachers could try co-creating learning by acting as brokers between the aspirations of learners and the demands of the education
Green My Reading we will be discussing as well (next week) but we need to #GreenMyLibrary so that people are free to choose if they want to green their thinking…
Learning Without Barriers is every Thursday morning at New Cross Learning 10.30am with free biscuits. Help us in our mission to create uncharted learning. We will be Greening everything until World Heutagogy Day 26 September 2019
That I submitted my Masters Thesis on Green Paths to the Information Society 2021. It was rejected. I was told that I could not write a thesis on how to make the future better I could only document what had been done in the past. This is why Universities and the education system cannot solve the environmental crisis that we now face in the Anthropocene. So I dutifully paid fees for one extra year and rewrote it. Or rather I wrote a second, completely different, thesis entitled Is there a Green IT strategy? That was good enough for a University but there was no way that it might SAVE PLANET A.
Nonetheless I was teaching green as Damian Randle calls it. In my Information, Technology and Society course at Lewisham College I taught the History of Technology from 1,000,000 years BC and about technology and social change from about 10,000 years BC (the city of Jericho). Not forgetting the transition into agriculture and settlements; that we still haven’t recovered from 25,000 years later. There are several definitions of technology, which I shared on the course, before evolving my own namely “technology is order imposed on nature.” Put another way our most environmentally damaging “technology” is how we think about nature. We need to put context (back) into knowledge, but that’s another story…
All my students had to include an assignment on the Environmental Impact of Technology reviewing how the specific technology that they had chosen, in order to analyse its social impact, also impacted on the environment. I always showed them Koyaanisqatsi to prompt discussion on our environmental impact; here’s part 1.
I learnt two things from all the good work by my students at Lewisham College. Firstly the best tool for quickly analysing our environmental impact is Product Lifecycle Analysis which looks at both where the resources from which we make any product are sourced and how they are disposed of (perhaps recycled) after use. Businesses ignore both of these key factors (why is it not a legal requirement?) in the environmental damage that we create every time we buy something. Secondly the industrial production process in itself uses vast amounts of both water and energy. Environmentally it’s way better NOT to make something that to make anything; hence reduce, reuse, recycle… As a simple rule to reduce your impact then reduce your energy use…
So I did Green My Teaching! How? Well firstly you can work on “brokering learning” between what your learners wish to learn and what the education system allows them to study. More guidance on how to broker learning here. Teachers also need to do the hard yards of working on curriculum change and writing the new units of green education that we need in order to transform learning so that it becomes fit for context. This is also true of any curriculum change involving contemporary issues concerning digital, community, politics and work, let alone environmental issues, such as climate change and the Anthropocene. If we teachers are to help learners by greening learning then we need to be capable of revising the curricula of formal education and creating a more dynamic and responsive learning offer which, unlike the planet, has been frozen since 1986 in the U.K. Or perhaps, as Bridget McKenzie puts it, we need to treat our home as The Learning Planet and incorporate it into everything that we learn about (agreed Bridget!) Look at her ideas on what we should STOP & START doing right now.
Self-determined learning is already green if you want it to be which is what we have been working on with the creativity of Heutagogy, with trusting the learner in WikiQuals and with the inclusivity of David Holloway’s Learning without Barriers project – we just need to #changetheframe of learning
Come along to New Cross Learning if you want to discuss how I can green my learning. Thursday 4th July 10.30am
If you are a teacher lets discuss how you can take responsibility for Teaching Green. Let’s change the National Curriculum. If you are a learner or student whether at school, college, even at our incredibly environmentally damaging Universities, come along and learn how you can green my learning. If you are an administrator, manager or even a policy wonk, come along and learn how you can green your institution with a green business strategy and a green digital strategy. After all that is in the Masters thesis that I was allowed to write. Incidentally my resubmitted thesis was also rejected initially as I had printed it on recycled paper. Recycled paper was not regarded by City University as being of good enough quality for one of their theses to be printed (in triplicate) on…
But I did help create the Creekside Environmental Education Centre in Deptford. If you do want to learn about green urban ecology take a low tide walk and learn about your green Lewisham in London in 2019; Sunday 21st July 2019
Third Placed 