Category: education

Categories
education geography

Educating global citizens

Ellen Schlosser

Giving students a holistic view – how we’re both interdependent and integrated is essential both for their futures and their ability to positively impact the world.

Ellen Schlosser [ 55:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ellen Schlosser is the Foundation Director of Global Connect and the Curriculum Development Advisor of the GlobalScope Curriculum Guides at University California Irvine.

Talking points

Working on something with meaning beyond the campus

Learning from experience fundamental to developing leaders and developing activism

Bringing social sciences to high school…information about the 21 Century world.

Telling stories that students could both academically and personally invest in.

Giving students a holistic view – how we’re both interdependent and integrated is essential both for their futures and their ability to positively impact the world.

You are not only a member of your local community, you are one of the seven billion people who inherit and are charged with caring for the earth.

We do need to challenge the American Dream. We can show inequality in America.

When things come close to home, they are much more easily understood.

The Project of Change is our call to action book…we help them to set up their own NGOs to address the Millennium Development Goals…it is really a recipe for action.

Agent of Change is one of our lessons.

Science is being shared as a global commodity

We have to change thought in order to change practice, to improve the environment

We’ve done such a good job of marketing science and social science separately, we’ve forgotten how to integrate the disciplines

We need the science…but to activate – to help a country in need, you need the humanities, you need the social sciences to help develop the narrative, to have a real impact, to really change the way we look at the world. It needs to be both.

(Success?) Being recognised as a viable course, acceptable, and building the bridge can open it the pathway for other projects

I would like to write a biographical sketch of what the students involved in this project have gone on to achieve…it’s amazing what they have done.

This programme honours serious students, but with communication skills to bring it to the high school classroom.

(Activist?) A late blooming activist? We have to start early on. Being of service to others should be taught in the home and carried through in the schools.

(Motivation?) Education – how your life can be transformed through school. When you write something that makes sense to someone else, enlightens someone, this is a great gift that I had no idea I would be academic. So I want to hold the light out for everyone.

(Challenges?) I would like to use my energies to help share this material

(Miracle?) I would love schools across the world to tell their students that they live beyond their immediate surroundings. And to enlighten them about others. You can’t keep your children hidden from the realities of the world, they’ll never function if you do. Enlighten the kids through global studies, and 21st Century – let’s not teach what was taught in 1955 – it’s not going to work.

(Advice?) having a formal education is vital to opening so many doors in life, but it is the curiosity and creativity that we each possess that can lead all us to new solutions. Remember to put yourself in the centre of what you are learning.

This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine in June 2015. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.

Categories
education geography urban

Technology as a tempting narrative

Josefin Wangel

There’s a strong technical solution bias – ICT is the new technical fix that will allow us to not change our lifestyles in order to achieve sustainability – and of course that’s hard to say no to, it’s very tempting to believe in such a narrative.

Josefin Wangel [ 56:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Josefin Wangel is Associate Professor in sustainable urban development at the Division of Environmental Strategies Research at KTH in Sweden. Her focus is on how sustainability is understood and put to practice in urban planning and policy making. She uses futures studies (mainly backcasting and design fictions), systems analysis (including target formulation and sustainability assessments), stakeholder analysis and discourse analysis.

Talking points

I knew wanted to try to save the world through environmental engagement of some sort.

I studied sciences because I thought that if I knew the sciences then people would listen to me – today I can see that that was a naïve understanding of the workings of society.

As an 18 year old, my understanding of a lack sustainability was that it was a lack of knowledge that makes society unsustainable.

I quickly realised that people knew, that it was bad for the environment to drive a car, for example, but still they drove a car -and that is when I realised that my natural science based education wasn’t really apt for answering the questions that I had.

Today if I had to choose, I would place myself more in the social sciences than the natural sciences.

Why aren’t we behaving in the way we should be behaving in order to save the planet?

The discrepancy between our stated intention and what we actually do can be found at all layers of society from the individual, through the community to the planners and politicians. I think this is where we can find leverage points to actually start doing sustainability.

Environmental effects are disconnected in time and space. If I eat chocolate I know the effects on me, but if I drive the car everyday then the effects are somewhere else, ten years from now – these effects are harder to grasp.

Sustainability issues are the result of collective action, or collective inaction. I don’t gain weight when my partner eats chocolate.

Sustainability is more than the functioning of ecosystems, the other dimension is social issues. However, I don’t think sustainability is the right word for social issues, it should be social justice or social desirabilities – for me sustainability – the ability to sustain is very much connected to the ecosystems.

Three step model: Brundtland…pillars interact. Then de-construct…a discursive perspective, talking of multiple sustainabilities, that our understanding of the world is always socially constructed…then students have to make up their own construction…that links to their own discipline.

It is important to dare to be very serious about the threats implied by surpassing the planetary boundaries.

The trick is to get them to realise at the bottom of their hearts what sustainability is about, and how deeply unsustainable and unfair the world is today. And then provide them with the tools for doing something about that.

If want sustainability to last…then people have to care at a personal level,

“Sustainable” urban development areas in Stockholm…show window for Swedish sustainability and ecotechnologies…however none of these areas are actually sustainable if by sustainable you have an understanding of absolute levels of pressure that the ecosystem – if you look at resource use, these areas aren’t sustainable, and if you look at resource use in terms of the global population it becomes obvious these areas aren’t socially just either.

This does come very close to greenwash.

There’s a strong technical solution bias – ICT is the new technical fix that will allow us to not change our lifestyles in order to achieve sustainability – and of course that’s hard to say no to, it’s very tempting to believe in such a narrative.

We in Sweden have wonderful life, but that is only possible because people in other parts of the world have lousy working conditions and suffer environmental degradation that the production of consumption good sold in Sweden results in.

For us, the status quo looks like the best option, but at the global scale, and taking social justice into consideration, then it isn’t sustainable.

As an individual it is hard, sometimes impossible, to see the consequences of collective actions and take responsibility for it.

(is sustainability a luxury?) You choose what to invest funds in, you can choose to invest in highways, or you can choose to invest in railways.

Do it yourself urbanism: people having opportunity to influence built environments themselves.

(Success) Interview in a big daily newspaper, I was able to start a national discussion about alternative discourses of sustainability.

(Activist) I used to be.

(Your teaching and research is normative) if you have a title with the word sustainability in it, then you are, at least if you are doing what your title says you are.

(Motivatation) I really love my work. I get to work on something I find super interesting and important.

(Challenges) Getting married. I was just appointed of director of collaboration and impact.

(Miracle) That everyone would realise the two dimensions ecological sustainability and social justice – and that economy is just a part of the social. The wedding cake, but with only two layers.

Categories
education

Inspiring community engaged sustainability scholarship

Abby Reyes

The role of the scholar, the engaged scientist and the engaged citizen are compatible, complementary, and in fact necessary.

Abby Reyes [ 1:01:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Director of the Sustainability Initiative at the University of California Irvine, Abby Reyes on creating opportunities for community engaged sustainability scholarship.

Talking points

We work to make community engaged sustainability scholarship integral to UC Irvine’s excellence as a research, teaching and service campus. We do that so our students, faculty and staff have the tools, training and resources they need to take bigger roles in addressing the critical sustainability challenges in our region and across the globe.

We’re doing that because the University of California of which we are part has a drive, a purpose, to accelerate the shifts we need to see to decarbonise the university and accelerate the shifts in other areas of our lives to reorganise how we relate to the planet and each other.

Re-imagining economy and tackling the big questions we face.

Sustainability leadership training…new set of skills that we belive the rising generation of sustainability leaders need to be able to be the knowledge brokers…the interpersonal skills and mastery to work together across traditional divides on these cross-cutting issues where what can make or break progress is how well people relate to each other and how outside of our own positions we can move to get to our underlying interests which are more often than not common about what kind of future we want to see for our families and our extended communities and our planet.

The approach we use is strategic questioning – a form of inquiry to enable young people to lead change processes in their community, from focussing on what’s concerning us most, through what do we want to see instead, through to what needs to change to get there, and then designing action for change.

We’re living on the front lines of a changing climate.

My mother raised us with an ethic of service and conservation.

Service is the path to freedom, to liberation in the spiritual sense, closer one’s self.

What we’re doing is offered in a gesture of creativity and joy and not a lot of attachment to the outcome. Very focussed on getting to our desired outcomes, but also not attached.

Inside the classroom students are definitely understanding the scale and pace of the deterioration of our critical life support systems in the planet. Outside the classroom we build community, then we draw upon tools to express fear, emptiness, sorrow and anger about the state of the world, we allow that some airtime, because they’re not getting that in the classroom and because our way of relating with these issues through social media is online and solitary endeavour even though it has the illusion of being connected with others it is often ill-processed or partially processed at best.

So we give that airtime, then help students see that the energy of anger is the same energy that drives passion.
The same energy that drives emptiness is the energy that enables us to work with equanimity and the letting go. The same energy that drives fear, the flip side of it is hope.

We help students go through that transition, then we get into what are you going to do about it?

I developed the analysis that carries me today – the inextricable relationship between environmental and human rights.

If we are working for protecting the earth, we also have to be working for protecting people.

Scholars and communities together, enabling the shifts that we need.

Working with solidarity and integrity with indigenous communities

When we talk about creating circumstances for young people to be the knowledge brokers, I’m thinking “what does it take to unleash the capacity of more young people to go out into the world and stand with the truth?”.

To stand in our knowledge of what it will take, right now, to transform our current systems and cultures of our industrial growth society into new systems and cultures of a life sustaining society. That is an unprecedented agenda, and it is one that is squarely on the shoulders of young people.

We train the workforce, and the more they have a sensibility of their place in the larger scheme of things, the more likely they are to place themselves in their organisations to step up and make transformational shifts.

We create circumstances to light the light about the roles people take.

We’re teaching people to look for windows of opportunity.

Academic freedom for faculty, but all students in both curriculum and co-curriculum.

Rolling this out 250,000 students is new, and people are excited by it, taking it to scale.

We find with young people, even the ones who are not yet activated, when we ask the right questions, the introspection and reflection is there – the awareness is there. It doesn’t take that much to get it to come to the surface in a students own words – in his or her own community and family’s relationship to the complex global

What does it take to awaken that conversation for all 29,000 students on our campus?

Campus as a living laboratory

What I’m finding now, is the under-current is not so far under we’re at a tipping point of conceptions of ourselves

(Sustainability at UCI…) has a long legacy…scientists here found the ozone hole, and went beyond their science to make sure it was addressed.

Our purpose…community engaged sustainability scholarship integral to UC Irvine’s excellence as a research, teaching and service campus…what this means to us is engages our students, faculty and staff in the understanding that the role of the scholar, the engaged scientist and the engaged citizen are compatible, complementary, and in fact necessary.

Resilience…is not an effort of bouncing back, but bouncing forward. The key elements are not only mitigation and adaptation, but also deep democracy.

The story we tell is simple: eco means home; ecosystems are relationships of home; ecology is our study of home, our knowledge of our relationships of home; economy is our management of home; our economy our way of managing should reflect our knowledge of our relationships of home; our fundamental relationships of home are interdependence; it is time for our economy to reflect our interdependence; it is time for us to do the work of releaving humanity back into the web of life; that means a lot of creative work to create new systems and cultures of a life sustaining society.

The American Dream is being constantly redefined. The version with the white picket fence and every man has his castle didn’t turn out to work for many people at all. The coyote trickster beauty of this moment of ecological transition is that we are talking about distributed power, we’re talking about people coming together to figure out their waste management and their food production, and their water gathering and energy storage, and when communities need to reorganise in this way then they need to know each other, they need to talk with each other, get in each others’ business and this is where the personal mastery comes in.

It needs a spectrum of strengths: people work to change the systems and cultures of industrialised growth society through actions like service, resistance, governance and reform, and people also dedicate themselves to create new cultures of life sustaining society. Transformation happens over time, and the most effective communities I have seen have people working all parts of the spectrum of strengths and knowing their location on that spectrum and that of other…so people aren’t working in isolation.

It is not my place to answer if what we are doing is radical enough, we do the training to set up young people to know how to ask the questions.

(Success?) We’re in the middle of the process, successes are around conversations. Some high points of success, Obama speaking about sustainability and climate change at UCI, the Dalai Lama.

(Activist?) I’m a life-long activist.

There are ways to walk in the world, characterised by action, without a stickiness around the outcome. Doing this work from a place of joy and integrity so that we can be here for the long-haul no matter what the long-haul brings. Our understanding is that if we do this work right now, we are developing the strengths of relationships and of inter-being that we will need to call on later if and when systems move towards collapse.

(Motivation?) I am here on this planet, I am alive, I am lucky enough not to have had my life taken already, there are plenty of people who are similarly motivated whose lives have been taken – if I’m still here the only work worth doing is work that enables people to have the space to life in freedom and live in the right relationships with each other and the earth.

(Challenge?) (UCI has set…) aggressive targets with lots of moving parts. But if we do it right it could be the blueprint for how to do it nationally and internationally. How to integrate South and North. Deepening students’ understanding of interdependence.

(Miracle?) Authentic engaged dialogue with communities. The shift I’m most interested in is what happens when we do the hard work to build communities right where we are to accelerate the shifts we need to see.

(Advice?) The perspective I would invite listeners to entertain is how would your life be different if you truly believed you belonged in the web of life, and how would your actions be different if you saw you had a critical role in the web of life to weave humanity back in.

This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.

Categories
education transition towns

Resilience, education and community building

Phil K

Doing things differently is an effective narrative.

Phil K - Oamaru Sustainable Skills Summer School [ 56:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Phil K runs the Sustainable Skills Summer School as part of Oamaru’s Transition Town movement.

Talking points

Meet people where they are and give them one step forward.

One thing that they could do immediately. Not a hundred things about possibilities – one thing

Live minimally in a way that doesn’t molest the earth – in a way that I think is sustainable and responsible – I think that comes from who I am.

I live minimally because I really like it, there’s things that I love and find satisfying, I’m not about to lecture other people to live like this because it’s going to save the planet, or something they should do, I would say find similar things that mean something to you that you can do and feel are worthwhile and satisfying – then yes, find a way to do it.

Even a small way, I’m not saying that people have to radically change their lifestyle – there’s things that people can do fufil those feeling good criteria, that you can put into your lifestyle.

There’s a really good chance that things are going to turn to custard, and we’ll want people to grow vegetables and share food, and use less, less fuel – don’t know whether that would happen by necessity. I’m not sure if that will be forced upon people.

Logically, we are over consuming, and we can’t keep over consuming for ever.

I thought I was crazy, why isn’t wearing a suit working. I think society has got to change, but that is personal. Do I think society has got to change? Yes, because I think that is the way that is is going, but it’s not like I’m wagging a finger saying “you’ve got to change because you’ve got the wrong way and I’ve got the right way”.

Narrative is incredibly important – you end up living the story you tell yourself.

Doing things differently is an effective narrative.

Commodification of attention

The ethos of the summer school is that individuals and communities will have to be more self reliant. And we get there though community sharing.

Just teach one small thing you know really well.

Summer School offers people seriously going through the door a step in the right direction.

Looking for people to see a wider view from that small thing. A transformative journey.

The way that people change is incremental, so the best we can do is incremental. Whether that is enough, I don’t know.

A resilient community has lots of networks.

The best thing we can do is make non-trivial connections.

People in Oamaru make things happen – they put on events and then they go to them.

We talk about self reliance, resilience, community building – those are all things people can latch onto withou thinking it’s a foreign language or against my politics.

Resilience and community building is a language that connects.

Green, not Green Party – more like earth.

Not ruining things is not the prerogative of any one political party.

(Success?) The way that I live becoming increasingly sustainable.

(Activist?) No. I do this personally as something that satisfies me. I don’t want to push people. I’m happy to live this way.

(Motivation?) Without hippy speak: Love. This is an astonishingly beautiful world. Caring provides the motivation. The cure will come from loving something.

(Challenges?) Physically getting older. Creating reducing systems.

(Miracle?) Cassandra’s dilemma – could tell the truth but no one believes you. My magic wand would have people believe climate change and sustainability message.

(Advice?) Act on things you care about. Stuart Kauffman – work with adjacent possible, what is beside you, possible and feels right. Do one of them, then look for another.

This series of conversations in Oamaru was prompted by discussions with Phoebe Eden-Mann following her OU Geography field trip to explore Oamaru as a transition town.

We are very grateful to the helpful folks from 45 South Television for the use of their studio.

Categories
architecture education

Making a difference at architectural scales

Tobias Danielmeier

I rank architecture by going to look at the bathrooms…it is the utilitarian areas that reveal weaknesses…but sustainability weaknesses in architecture are much more disguised.

Tobias Danielmeier [ 55:11 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Tobias Danielmeier teaches and researches sustainable architecture in the School of Design at Otago Polytechnic. He was instrumental in the First Light House – the first Southern Hemisphere entry into the Solar Decathlon. He is also interested in performative architecture – a combination of how a building works functionally and in telling stories.

Talking points

I rank architecture by going to look at the bathroom…it is the utilitarian areas that reveal weaknesses…but sustainability weaknesses in architecture are much more disguised.

There is ideally a marriage of people and place – how the building sits in within its environment.

We’ve seen a shift in how students treat sustainability. For a long time now they have been driven to change the world, then this changed as they saw the problems as too big, we can’t tackle them; the changed again, but now this is changing back again to more inspirational values – we can make a difference.

Connecting with regional experiences, authentic experiences..craft beers, regional cuisines…this is what I mean by post consumerism architecture.

(Activist?) Passive activist. Opening minds of young people.

(Motivation?) Good architecture – striving for better tomorrows.

(Smallest thing that would make the biggest impact?) Better public transport – different ways of achieving the 1/4 acre dream. Not compromising on luxuries, but achieving them in different ways.

(Advice for listeners?) Investigate localised energy production. Try to become energy independent.

Categories
ecology education restoration ecology urban

Interdisciplinary ecological restoration

Bruce Clarkson

The problems of degradation are not just the sole domain of biophysical scientists.

Bruce Clarkson [ 50:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Professor Bruce Clarkson is Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Waikato, and is the Interim Director of the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. He is recognised as one of New Zealand’s foremost authorities on ecological restoration. We talk about his background, what we learnt from island and mainland sanctuaries, and the opportunities and challenges of restoring ecosystems in urban environments.

Talking points

Most people don’t experience nature in a way we did in previous generations

How might you restore indigenous nature in an environment where people can access them more easily?

New Zealand has extremely high levels of endemism…if we don’t look after these native plants and animals, no one else is going to do it…this is our responsibility.

This is our biological heritage, this is what makes NZ special and different, it’s our responsibility as stewards of the land to maintain our natural heritage.

What you are really trying to do is manage the whole system, but a focus on birds will have positive spinoffs for the rest of the ecosystem

So what you are trying to achieve in the longer term is a recovery of the whole system, not just the bird populations.

It has to be a mix and match of approaches and a portfolio of places.

We’re working for the very long term so we have to build resilience into the system.

If we don’t do it, we will be responsible for the extinctions because we brought in the agents of change.

If we protect species, we protect their house.

We can treat our native birds as the umbrella species for the whole system that we’re trying to maintain, protect and restore.

Cities have some advantages over wildlands in terms of protecting native plants and animals…just think of the example of grazing animals.. you don’t have to confront the problems of goats and grazing cattle.

Looking after your own backyard and being a steward of something you cherish.

Start at a scale you can manage, have a plan and progressively recover what you are trying to achieve.

You can make big mistakes, the classic mistake people make in gully restoration is that they bite off more than they can handle.

I tend to be an optimist. Yes, there’s a lot of negative out there, and there’s a lot of degradation of the environment still going on. It would be an interesting research question, what would be the threshold point at which recovery tipped the balance back to the point where there was more improvement going on than degradation? I think in some points in our region we are very close to that threshold. Overall it is still a fact that New Zealand is still losing things. Forests are being cleared, wetlands are being drained, nowhere near the rates they were previously when we were in the land development phase, but some of that is still going on. There are large parts of the Department of Conservation estate where there little active management is occurring, and those areas are also going backwards. But the point is that there are significant areas where we are making a difference. So I see it in a more optimistic way. Know also, that we do have the technologies to do more and more of this restoration, it’s really a question of how much time, effort and funding is New Zealand as a nation prepared to put into it to get us to the threshold of recovery at regional and national scale.

We’re trying to bridge the interdisciplinary gaps.

The point is how we deal with interdisciplinary problems.

The problems of degradation are not just the sole domain of biophysical scientists. To get the results that you want you need expertise in a wide range of areas. This is another advantage of working in urban areas, there are a lot of professions, all with interests in how we might restore urban environments.

We want engineers who not only know about engineering, but know about the environment as well.

I think the solutions to most (environmental) problems are actually about how we build bridges between the different disciplines…to come together and work collaboratively.

Increasingly, graduates from university are expected not just to know about their discipline, they are expected to work in multidisciplinary teams, on projects where people are trying to achieve solutions to particular problems.

It’s not just about a technical fix, it’s about understanding how you can do things in different ways, often the ways things use to be.

Restoration ecology is difficult, reconstructing an ecosystem takes time, but if you go into it knowing that and how the system works, you can make a long term plan for restoration, a plan for a process that might be inter-generational.

A 500 year plan, with milestones along the way

Once you’ve started a project, once you see process, people take pride in the process. It’s quite inspirational what a change you can make on the landscape in such a short time.

(Activist?) People who work in universities in many respects are people who love ideas, and love the debate around ideas – and if that is what an activist is, then essentially that’s what you are. You’re looking at systems, you’re understanding the system, and you’re trying to pass on your knowledge of how best to manage that system in an effective way. If that is what an activist is, then that’s what you are.

(Motivation?) Students, seeing the progress my students make, and where they end up. Being able to contribute to knowledge and process. The process of protecting and restoring plant communities and the animals that go with them – for some reason as a child that gelled with me, and I’m still passionate about achieving the same thing. Making a difference.

(Challenges?) Staying fit and healthy and keeping going.

(Miracle?) A silver bullet for pest control. Some new way that is socially acceptable for controlling mammalian predators that prey on our native birds. That would very rapidly and radically alter our landscape.

(Advice?) Look around your own neighbourhood, find out who are the people doing this sort of work and go along and give them a hand because they need all the help they can get.

Categories
education

Creating opportunities to connect the dots

Jen Roders

It is important to bring things back to what people think is relevant. Perhaps a place that is special to them, what could affect that place? How could you positively or negatively affect that?

Jen Rodgers [ 55:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Jen Rodgers is the Sustainable Practice Adviser at Otago Polytechnic. We talk about her background, what led to her seeing education as a lever, and how she integrates advising on both operational sustainability and education for sustainability.

Talking points

I decided to go to Teachers College when I realised that I couldn’t save the world by myself.

If you can find out what people are interested in, then you can start from there.

Opening people’s eyes to things perhaps outside their normal scope.

Sustainability is a journey not a destination.

Saying I don’t have all the answers gives the ability for others to do the same.

Be critically thinking about actions.

Think about things outside the immediate

It is important to have an idea of reality, be grounded and look at what is possible

It is important to bring things back to what people think is relevant. Perhaps a place that is special to them, what could affect that place? How could you positively or negatively affect that?

It is important for organisations to be in this space, yes it is political, and that is important.

Giving people the opportunities to connect the dots.

Communicating positive things that are happening, stories to inspire people.

Challenges, how do we enable people who are sitting on the fence, or on the other side of the fence thinking how is this of any relevance to me?

(Activist?) Yes, Activists are trying to change things, in general trying to do positive things

(Motivation?) Hope. Seeing that people can change, and look at things from different perspectives.

(Challenges) Working out what can be barriers for people to be sustainable practitioners – how to enable them?

(Miracle) Open minds.

(Advice?) Don’t be afraid to look at things, try some stuff, don’t get stuck in overwhelming doom.

Categories
art education

Art, science and imagination

Daro Montag

The biggest problem we’re facing is a lack of imagination

Daro Montag [ 58:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Daro Montag is a professor of Art and Sustainability at Falmouth University. There he heads the RANE research group, examining the relationship between the visual arts and ecological thinking, with the aim of contributing to a more sustainable future.

Talking points

Art and science are not always looking in the same direction.

For most of humanity’s existence, a living planet has been a given.

The biggest problem we’re facing is a lack of imagination

A whole cascade of problems caused by the population multiplied by our lifestyles – we’re victims of our own success.

Should we be looking towards unsustainable, and helping to steer that change?

We’re living in a bubble, and we need to be aware of it, thankful for it, but we need to do with less.

We are living in a privileged times, but they are limited. It is the responsibility of professors and artists to be thinking of alternatives.

As an artist I don’t really make a distinction between making pictures and the rest of your life.

It’s about stories you live by.

Art is not something you produce, it’s a way of being.

The growth of the smartphone camera is dangerous, if we experience the world through a lens we lose the connection, the world becomes 2D, not living – we treat the world as a dead object to be captured.

I try to make (my students) aware of what is happening, with art students there’s a door you can open.

You don’t separate art from the environment.

Art is activist provocation

The idea of being an artist who produces for a gallery is over – art is about a gesture. Art is a verb, not a noun.

(Motivation?) Fun. The global environmental message is very doomy. The world is in a very dire predicament, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to do something positive about it.

This given situation, what we know, it’s our responsibility to get up and do something – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and enjoyable.

It’s not about sacrifice and giving things up, it’s about weaving a better story.

(Activist?) Yes. Anyone wanting to change the world for the better is an activist. There are different ways of doing.

Activism isn’t about saying no, it is not just about protest. Activism can be about positive choices, fostering imagination.

(Miracle) That we realise that there is enough energy from the sun to meet all of our needs. And the crazy thing is that it is true…back to that lack of imagination problem.

(Advice) Educate yourselves – keep the imagination alive.

Categories
education systems

Transforming education

Stephen Sterling

Stephen Sterling [ 57:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Professor Stephen Sterling is of Head of Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Plymouth. His argument that education needs to both transform and be transformative has transformed Education for Sustainability, both in the UK and internationally.

Talking points

I was an environmentalist before the term was coined

I read a book Teaching for Survival, about the time of the first big environmental conference in Sweden… and I thought, I’m going to get into environmental education, because that’s what’s going to make the difference.

(When did it become sustainability as we know now?) There was sent discussion pre-1987 but the Brundtland report was the turning point…the debate shifted up a gear and sustainable development became part of the currency.

1992 was a key point with the two streams really coming together

(Masters programme developed by WWF) Originally called Masters in Environmental and Development Education, it brought together the two streams, later it changed its name to Education for Sustainability.

“What’s your definition of sustainability?” is not a sound bite kind of a question. I tend to get round it by saying it’s the sorts of approaches (to education and learning) that we need if we are to assure the future economically, socially, and environmentally.

I see sustainability as a set of system conditions…conditions that for all intents and purposes can last forever, whatever system you are talking about. Sustainable Development is a pathway towards those conditions, but it’s a dynamic state.

I remember Crispin Tickell…talking about those three dimensions…not just in terms of having the three dimensions – because people think if you’ve got the three that’s it – but in terms of “seeing them in terms of each other”.

I make the distinction between the weak and strong sustainability diagrams. I go for the strong sustainability diagram – a systems diagram with concentric circles – economy being a subset of society, society being a subset of environment. The Venn diagram is good as a teaching tool – asking what is right and wrong with it? – but in terms of representing reality we have to go with a strong systems diagram.

Recently I’ve been working on, if you’ve got the philosophical ideas, how do they apply in a practical setting. The application of the ideas and their implications…is a challenge…how to reorient (higher education) towards sustainability.

I think one of the key problems with our western psyche is a reductionist mindset

People think that’s something that geographers and scientist should do, but we put it into yet another box

Sustainability is not the key issue…the problem is unsustainability

The key issue is why is a lot of what we do unsustainable?

What informs worldviews and mindsets…what does the required change in mindset mean, and what is the role of education in getting us there?

Education itself is not necessarily a solution unless we look at the assumptions and paradigms that influence educational policy and practice.

How can we rethink educational paradigms, policy and practice so that it is more amenable…the challenge of unsustainability and the opportunities of sustainability?

We need transformation in learner and process

We need learning processes that go deeper than content…engagement of deeper parts of our beings…requirements for teaching contexts

Getting people to think about deeper questions, their own assumptions and social assumptions…that’s where reflexivity comes in, and you can’t achieve a level of reflexivity with learners unless you have teaching and learning situations that stimulate that kind of reflection.

Always it’s a matter of bringing in sideways views and surprises in teaching methodology. For people to think “oh, ok, well..” and starting thinking and questioning and making enquiries that they wouldn’t otherwise not have made.

A lot of it is focussing on issues that are not amenable to standard solutions, maybe present ethical dilemmas and so on. That demands a deeper level of reflection than simple factual stuff.

Different disciplines will have different content bases, but sustainability demands a deeper response, making connections which otherwise wouldn’t be made.

I’ve made a career of trying to encourage teachers and learners to think in more holistic ways.

(How much do you need to front-load with gloom?) Not an easy question to answer – differences of opinion. Reality or disempower? Tendency…is to front-load too much around big issues and trends.

I think we need a degree of realism…there’s enough research reports to refer to…but balance that content around all the considerable initiatives, positive, driving forward that sustainability is inspiring.

Relational thinking.

Adjectival education…all about trying to improve relationships with something – relationality. ‘Education for change’ movements are all about trying to change relationships for the better.

Gregory Bateson in 1972 said we are governed by epistemologies we know to be wrong – objectivism, materialism, reductionism, dualism and so on. These ideas are part of the western intellectual legacy. These ideas cut us off from each other and from the environment. What we need to do is what Peter Reason calls an extended epistemology: embracing the other. Our relationship with others, our relationship with the natural world, our relationship with animals, our relationship with future generations. That idea of relationality is key to sustainability. A lack of relationship – a lack of identification, a lack of empathy – at it’s heart underpins unsustainbility, because we’re left with individualism.

We live in a systematic world

Everything is highly interconnected, and that’s been exacerbated by the technological revolution and globalisation, we need modes of thinking that are adequate to that highly interconnected world. If we think in a reductionist and individualist way, also an aggressive and competitive way, that’s going to cause more harm than good.

We need to think in a way that we are more aware of systemic consequences because they happen anyway

We need to use everything we’ve got at our disposal, some people are dismissive of social marketing “that’s not proper education”, but we need to use everything we have, time is short, if you can give people financial incentives to ‘do the right thing’ then that’s a start, and they might go beyond that to ask why they are encouraged to do that.

There’s no single answer to any of this.

All the issues tend to be related, we can’t just tick off climate change and say ‘well that’s done’, it has huge links with other issues, that was pointed out by Club of Rome, 40 years ago. We need to see issues together. That aside, the issue that worries me that doesn’t get much attention which I think is addressing biodiversity.

People tend to think biodiversity is ‘just a few plants and animals, very nice but we can afford to lose a few’, but that’s the web of life that supports everything else.

Quite apart from the arguments for the intrinsic value of nature – they have a right to exist in their own right – that’s whole idea of ecosystems services. The functions the ecosphere performs are vital, if that breaks down you can forget economic growth.

Clearly putting everything in terms of what nature does for us is important, but it shouldn’t be the only reason we’re looking after nature – intrinsic values not instrumental values

The Future Fit thinking framework is a practical guide

Focus on problem solving worries me

We live in a culture…coming out of our scientific legacy…we tend to think if we can define a problem then there must be a solution.

Clearly a lot of problems are amenable to simple problem solving…but not all problems are, and sadly a lot of sustainability problems are not of that character – they are complex, wicked problems that are not amenable to simple problem solving.

Learners need to be given a range of problems, from simple problems right through to complex issues – and get them to think how they should be approached differently, and that gives them an intellectual toolkit – to recognise that there’s no single category called problems, and that there’s a whole spectrum of different problems of different nature that require different approaches

Wicked problems can be approached…we can take actions which have beneficial systemic consequences. But if you take ill-considered unwise actions you start having a number of negative consequences that you didn’t foresee.

Critical thinking, but then what? What is your response to that? If you manage to raise someone’s critical awareness about an issue, but then don’t offer them a way of taking that inquiry forward, allowing them any form of engagement – that’s a bit of a half step – leaving the inquiry half way through

(Motivation) From when I was a kid, I’ve felt part of the whole, I’ve been outward looking, been aware of others – nature, animals, people, people and my place in relation to them – I’ve always felt that way and wanting to make a change for better

(Activist?) In a kind of way, yes, but not in the way that term often implies. I can look back over the last 30 years and know that I’ve enabled quite a lot of change to happen. To that extent yes, but I’m not out on the streets with barricades.

(Challenges) I find myself in a fortunate and privileged position, I want to use it wisely and well because it’s a responsibility.

I don’t write a lot of academic journal papers because I don’t think they make much difference, I’m in this game to change thinking and action.

(Miracle) What’s been frustrating has been a lack of real understanding by government and senior civil servants…if governments really understood the depths of challenges we’re facing nationally and globally over the next 20-30 years, maybe they would be more supportive the changes in education that I’ve been advocating

The reason governments don’t respond is for one of two reasons, one is that they don’t understand it, the other is that they do understand it. Because if they do understand, it means a radical shift in policy…and they’re not necessarily up for that.

(What could we do to simplify sustainability narrative?) An extremely good question, we’re stuck in a semantic problem, for some people we need to get away from the sustainability narrative itself and put it in terms people can come to terms with on their own terms.

Systems thinking is a way of getting people to recognise the dynamic nature of things, and their place in it, and the importance of taking note of consequences.

(Advice) Get informed, and get involved. There’s so much people can do at any level. At lot of it is possibly difficult but it is in many ways exciting.

Note: this interview was recorded in the week of the Scottish Independence referendum in early September 2014.

Categories
communication community computing education maori

Virtual marae

Dee O'Carroll

It’s cold pressing your nose against the screen

Acushla Dee O'Carroll [ 54:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Acushla Dee O’Carroll  (Ngaruahine Rangi, Ngāti Ruanui, Te Ä€ti Awa) is a Senior Research Officer at AUT University.  She recently completed her PhD Kanohi ki te kanohi – a thing of the past? An examination of Māori use of social networking sites and the implications for Māori culture and society.  Dr O’Carroll’s research explores the tensions that Māori face as they negotiate virtual spaces and navigate new territories of social networks, highlighting the pressures on kanohi ki te kanohi practice (face to face). We ask if there can really be a virtual marae?  and what are the implications of this on tuakiritanga (cultural identity) and tikanga (customary practices).  What impacts are facebook and twitter having on indigenous ways of communicating? and should marae develop social media policies?

Dee was at Otago Polytechnic as part of the Ako Aoteroa funded National Project in Learners and mobile devices (#NPF14LMD): A framework for enhanced learning and institutional change.

 

 

Categories
education game design gaming

Talking about a game for talking about sustainability

Patrik Larsson

  I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.

Patrik Larsson [ 59:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Patrik Larrson is creator of GaSuCo “Gaming in Sustainability through Communication”. We talk about his motivations and the role of discussion in sustainability. This conversation was recorded after we talked after we played the game with Elina Eriksson and Daniel Pargman‘s Masters course in Sustainable Media Technology at KTH in Stockholm (flickr set).

Talking points

The game focuses on interaction between players

Not only do you get to talk about the things you feel are important, you also get to listen to other people’s thoughts on the same subject

I was challenged (in my Masters) to think what is the next big thing? I thought the solution shouldn’t be to invent something for the future, I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.

Interaction and discussion is a much better way of sharing knowledge than just looking something up.

The questions are designed for discussion…both viewpoints are correct..there are no right or wrong answers.

The questions are designed to be tough and hard and difficult, but however you approach a subject it is still correct.

Your lack of knowledge might be someone else’s chance to talk about a subject, what they feel is important about that subject…then next time you can relate to what that other student said

You bring other peoples’ knowledge with you – to create your own base of knowledge.

The questions are written in a way that they are supposed to be challenging.  It’s no fun if you always know what the answer is.

If you always know the answer, you don’t progress, you don’t get challenged in your way of thinking.

When discussing things with no actual answers you get all different kinds of viewpoints.

You don’t have to agree, you just have to talk about it.  In the process of talking you get to hear so many different kinds of unexpected  (and expected) aspects of subjects that are so important but too easily forgotten

There’s a discussion question “Is it OK to buy second hand Christmas gifts?” and this can be followed in the discussion with “…and do you?”.  There is a difference between acting and saying, we also highlight that,. it is easy to have a viewpoint of the correct thing, but when you discuss it these differences become clear.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but you have to motivate your answer.  You have to be able to stand up for what you think.  As long as you can do that, you’re entitled to whatever opinion you want.  I’m not here to change anybody to think what I think, I just want to engage people in talking about it.

I cannot force someone to think what I think.  But this is a way of helping them discuss it, and understanding themselves that we cannot continue business as usual.

Wealth is not only based on economic growth

The main thing is that people play the game and understand that there are different ways of looking at how we are living, and talk about it.

People have this feeling that someone, somewhere is going to make a change.    That itself has to change.

Motivation: understanding that we are all different but cannot continue what we’ve been doing, this is my way of contributing to that change.

Activist: I’m just a regular guy trying to make education more fun.

Challenges: High school, and then try for a computer version without losing the core of interaction.

Categories
computing education

Standing on the brink

Elina Eriksson

Even in a future of scarcity, we still need technology, we just have to design it very differently.

Elina Eriksson [ 54:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Elina Eriksson is interested in issues of usablity and user-centred design to promote change; both organizational change and change in individual behaviour.

Elina has multiple affiliations at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is in the School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC), the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) and in research groups Green Leap and the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC).

Talking points

I realised quite early on that I don’t only want to work in computer science in programming, but I also want to get close to people and change stuff – so Human Computer Interaction became my major.

There is definitely a gender issue in how computer science portrays itself.

The Brundtland definition is talked about but it’s not really operationable.

The environmental aspects to sustainability are clearly important, with climate change, but I also feel very strongly for the social side of sustainability.

Circles within circles, we have to live within the bound of our earth.

Sometimes I think we are not good enough at reflecting on what we are doing and why. We can get so enthusiastic about new technology that we don’t really look back at what we are doing.

To create smart sustainable cities we need a bottom up view – what practices are making a difference and how can we help these practices through infrastructure?

Sustainability needs us to work on several different levels at the same time. Both at the policy legislation levels, and to change social norms – the culture.

For HCI this means a focus on norm-critical design. Technology can help people reflect more on their own practices.

HCI has such a suite of methods for helping improve work practices, now is the time to scale that up to the community – to smart cities.

Students report a cognitive dissonance, on one hand they are taught to develop new cool Apps, and on the other we come with our Sustainability course and tell them that this might not be the best way of working.

We focus on predicaments rather than problems. Problems are things we can solve, whereas predicament might be situations that are not solvable.

You have to find ways to work with a predicament, but there might not be one single solution.

We think it is important to be honest with students, that we are standing on the brink.

We try to find a balance between facts and values.

We can’t require them to have a particular value, but we can show…that as soon as we talk about the future, it is no longer a fact based science, it’s about values – what kind of future would we like to have.

ICT is interwoven with everything we do today in society, how much ICT is involved in efficiency, how much our norms and beliefs and culture is based on what we meet in the media

We play a discussion based board game – Gaming in Sustainability through Communication.

(Challenge) integrate sustainability into programme.

As long as the main goal of our education is forcing our students to work in an unsustainable manner, we will never reach a sustainable future.

How can we reach a sustainable future if we still have a consumer society?

Technology is a problem, but it can also solve things, dematerialise and make processes more efficient.

The fundamental problem of working with sustainability – it’s such a big system to change.

Related
Daniel Pargman

Categories
education maori

Living and learning as the environment

David McKay

Sustainability is a way of thinking and a way of being. It’s a way of embodiment, it has nothing to do with study, it has nothing to do with opinion, it has to be with way that you be, that you are.

David McKay [ 1:09:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

David McKay is a researcher at University of Otago’s CSAFE. His recently completed PhD thesis considers the relationships between Māori cultural perspectives and environmental education policy or practice.

Talking points

As a science and technology based society we tend to assume that technology can solve everything and tend to overlook that we are a biological species and part of the environment rather than separate to it

We tend to overlook the gap between cause and effect in nature that tends to be from twenty and fifty years. So If I do something I won’t know the consequences for about 50 years, in management we tend to manage for about five years…

Fifty year management plans start to acknowledge the ecological gap

(David Orr) teachers need to be specialised generalists

Our problems started when we began to think we were bigger than nature, we got too big for our boots.

The environment doesn’t have a crisis, humans have a crisis.

It’s a bit like a learner surfer – a grommet – out in the big surf and not noticed that all the experienced surfers have gone in before the waves start dumping , in our society we’ve got an invisible wave building, we don’t know how big it is going to be, we don’t know when it is going to crash,but there’s nothing surer than it’s going to crash – there’s going to be consequences for the history that we have, its just a matter of whether we survive or not. That’s why I’m interested in resilience.

We used to have worms on the footpaths after rains, that doesn’t happen any more, but no one is literate enough of the environment to stop and wonder why. That’s an indicator, worms are in soils that are healthy, if there are no worms than our soils aren’t healthy – we manicure everything, nuke our gardens lawns and parks to control what we call pests…the trouble is they’re not discriminate, they kill the pests they kill the worms… and if the chemicals we put in the garden are doing in the worms in the garden it’s doing in you as well.

No one wants to hear what really needs to be said and done because it’s telling that naughty kid that they can’t play with the stick anymore. Same consequences, just more serious than breaking windows – we’re talking about survival and continuance here. We break this environment, evolution is going to carry on with or without us, what we’re playing with is whether we are going to be a part of that or not.

When the consequences are there, it’s too late. 20-50 years of damage and symptoms building up, it’s going to take at least that to undo it.

Environmental Education, Education for Sustainability, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s common sense

What does make sense is learning for survival and continuance with integrity

Understandings of environmental education amongst practitioners

There’s nothing in the (environmental education) literature that anything like matches up with the “old ways”.

People interpret the curriculum in a western point of view rather than a holistic view

Could we come up with a multi-cultural paradigm?

For many people the environment is something magical, out there, away from where we are. This totally overlooks that not only are we – you and me – in the environment right now, we are the environment.

Engagement and connection is what’s missing.

We haven’t lost the connection…we’ve forgotten it. We just forgotten that we are part of all that is. we haven’t lost anything, we’re not disconnected, we’ve forgotten what we are.

We are inextricably interconnected, interrelated and interdependent on all that is.

We lose sight of this simplicity – and that’s what we need to rediscover.

Elders tend to speak less, but more cryptically. When they do speak it’s a good idea to listen.

It is part of multi-culture that it is cryptic, there are levels of understanding of the same message. Education is about readiness, if you are up to getting the message then so be it, if you’re not then nothing is wasted.

A taonga said to me “you pakeha fellas, You measure the readiness of our young people by them giving the right answer – what the system wants – we measure readiness by our young people by them asking the right questions, and that is a different thing entirely”.

A very important to learning in traditional Māori ways is critical thinking and individual identity, and having the mana and self confidence to be yourself, and stand to your rights and ask those questions and if it doesn’t match up, to disagree.

Living and learning as the environment or as part of, rather than in the environment, about the environment or even for the environment.

People coming from cooperative societies (the marae)… walking with feet very firmly in both worlds, and that’s something awesome.

In many cultural worlds time has no meaning…but timing is everything.

(David interviewees were) aghast at the thought that anyone could think the other way – how could you not understand that you are related to everything – we are all stardust.

Learning is about actualising the potential of being the best of the best of who you can be, and because it is about being the best of who you can be, and we can never be the same, we can never be taught the same things. In a crisis we all know something a bit different, we all know each others’ strengths and we can all work together very strongly…makes a very strong and resilient community.

Model:

  • Whakapapa, more than genealogy – it’s about learning about relationships/li>
  • Self identity
  • Survival skills
  • Community cohesion
  • Transferal and continuance

    • Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a learner. Learning is a life journey

    I don’t agree that you have to go to pristine areas – ‘the hills are alive with sound of music’ – no, it’s about understanding that we are biological beings and part of ecology. Pure and simple, if you don’t get that then there is no such thing as sustainability.

    We’re learning for well being, and if you’re well then you can be resilient, a little bit of flexibility and adaptability, and then you can survive, and then you can continue.

    It’s like the car accident mentality – it can’t possibly happen to me”, well it is happening, except it’s not an accident, we are causing the disaster.

    Activist? Not really. Educator. I have a reputation for saying what needs to be said, and not necessarily politely. But frankly we haven’t got time to be polite.

    Challenges: Help shift the paradigm.

    Advice: Get out on streets rather than facebook.

    Resources

    David Orr
    Educating as if the earth matters

    Soil erosion rate is about 10 times faster than the rest of the world (PCE report)

    Matauranga taio:
    Guidelines for Environmental Education in NZ

    Categories
    computing education

    Opening education

    Wayne Mackintosh

     

    Wayne Mackintosh [ 55:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    The key challenge we are trying to address is how to provide spaces for the additional one hundred million students – that’s the equivalent of building four sizeable universities with roughly 30,000 students each, every week for the next 15 years.

     

    Dr Wayne Mackintosh imagines a world where anyone in the world has access to a world-class education online for free, and getting credentials for it.    But he is not just imagining it, he is doing it.  Wayne holds the UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic. He is the founding Director of the OER Foundation and the International Centre for Open Education based at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.  He talks about the launch of Open Educational Resources University (OERu) – a significant milestone in higher education globally, and marking a transition from an international collaboration prototype to a sustainable, scalable program of accessible OERu study.

    We are shifting the question from how do you achieve sustainable OER projects at your institution to, how will your institution remain sustainable without OER? We are the competition on the doorsteps of tertiary education institutions around the world

    The conventional model of delivery is not going to be able to respond to the challenge of the growing need internationally.

    I’m a teacher by choice, and it’s been the most rewarding decision I have taken in my career

    Smart thinking, use technology to reach the unreachable

    Absolutely I’m an activist, an open source, open education activist.

    it’s (open education) mission critical for a more sustainable planet. We need to be using scarce resources more effectively, and respect the fundamental freedom of expression – freedom of speech- that we espouse to in modern democracies

    Shane’s number of the week: 4,500,000. That is there are 4.5 million people in the UK who are members or supporters of environment and conservation groups.

    Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam talked us through the increasingly important role of social enterprise in computing.

    Categories
    education systems

    Systematic activist educator

    Liam Phelan

    Liam Phelan [ 58:32 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    Connections between education, social justice and sustainability are of key interest for me. This is why I teach.

    Dr Liam Phelan‘s biographical note at the University of Newcastle starts with “My primary research interest is sustainability and how to achieve it”. We talk about that.

    Liam works at the nexus of climate change, finance, human rights and ecological sustainability. His recent research interests have focussed on governance of the Earth system as a complex adaptive system comprising human-social and ecological elements, and its key characteristics, including thresholds, non-linear change, and capacity for surprise. We talk about education, perverse resilience and much more.

    We face a sustainability paradox: maintaining the desirable familiar stability of the Earth System requires a radical change in the human-social systems nested within it.

    We have a pressing ecological need for radical social change to ensure the ongoing viability of human society’s ecological foundations

    How many concerned citizens does it take to change a light bulb? Probably just one. But the magic really comes from a community approach.

    Transformation is essential.

    When did we last have an argument about gravity?

    Think about how you want your world to be, and make it so.

    From a systems perspective, the idea that something on planet earth is not part of planet earth is plainly nonsense.

    Some realism is important, but we also need the idealism so we know where we are going.

    (Am I an activist?). Yes. Absolutely. I feel that university is a place you can do activism. You could also work at Greeenpeace, go to parliament, wherever you like. There are real places you can do activism. Activism is an activity, it is an active approach. (That doesn’t conflict with the objective, critical thinking role of the academic?) Activism requires critical thinking – that’s how I came to be teaching at the university. The privilege of being required to do critical thinking in the cause of activism…with civil society organisations…exposed all the time to cutting edge thinking, but sometimes without the time to spend thinking more deeply – theorising – these things are possible in academia. (You’re OK with wearing your heart on your sleeve?). Yeah, (Stanley Fish, critical thinking and nothing else). That worked for a while, but those days are past. The idea that scientific research, critical thinking can exist without some explicit normative basis is silly.

    Trainspotting: Liam references Rebecca Solnit’s work but the title eludes him. Here are two of the likely suspects: Hope in the dark (2004) and Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007).

    Categories
    education language peace

    Peace and poetry

    Alison Phipps

    Alison Phipps [ 59:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    It is time to acknowledge that the seeds of violence are within all of us and if we become what we hate, we lose.

    Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow.
    Her research interests focus on languages and intercultural studies, with a particular critical concern for the different ways in which people learn to live and communicate together by stepping outside comfortable or familiar contexts. She was in New Zealand as keynote speaker at the higher education conference – HERDSA, where she gave a talk entitled “When Learning is placed under Siege: Conflict, Creativity and Compassion in Higher Education”.

    The more I try to do, the more I have no to do

    We have to learn to live confessional lives, lives that still honour beauty, diversity, goodness and truth

    How do we live when we have created the conditions of our own destruction? And what is the role of the university with that? To teach dispositions to live with that knowledge.

    The place of learning is people

    We have never been so educated as to be released our need to be dependent on the material. I’m inspired by the work of
    Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: we must reflect on the fact that the material conditions of our educational systems in Western Universities are based on the fact that we are not required to grow our own food and make our own clothes. And that led me to ask the question, and what would they look like if we were? And how might we grow and spin a university if it were. … the university is opening out from the days that it was theoretically an ivory tower – I’m not sure it ever has been an ivory tower but it certainly has been a place of the elite. We are now seeing universities setting up communities and projects (community gardens etc) and it is being changed by that – new knowledges are coming onto campus. This is very exciting as the university has to move its thinking around as people go to work in different communities.

    (how much personal responsibility do we need to take). The critic and conscience of society applies to the university and the people with in it. The mantra ‘but there’s no alternative’ is far too easy. …invading Iraq…supermarkets…but actually there are alternatives being worked out all over the world by creative and courageous people., but often beginning in very small ways. I draw real hope from that. It’s important for me as an academic to try to live as an alternative, and to let people draw their own conclusions, and to decide for themselves to decide whether it is for them to live that alternative. I cannot live otherwise. But this was never a revolutionary action, yes I’ve been engaged in action all my life, but this wasn’t one huge enormous change, these were small steps. I wonder what life would be like if I didn’t have a car…? What would life be like if I filled by home with people who would otherwise be destitute…? There are no answers to these, but with anthropological training I know what can be learned from experience. So in a sense it is a new adventure to try and live in these ways and find out what can be learned. What I’m learning, perhaps is the beginnings of an art of forgiveness, compassion, and possibly humility.

    (Am I an activist?). It’s a hard word, I’ve used it of myself, but I’ve always been a little shy of it. Maybe it is because I’m a bit of a poet – maybe there’s too many consonants in the word. I do. But I believe profoundly in solitude and rest and quiet. And the more I try and do, the more I know I have to not do. And those are very contradictory dynamics. But I think I discover when I have been very active and moving very much, but it is important to sit and stop and think – watch and take stock and be restored by what is around me. So yes I do and yes I don’t consider myself to be an activist.

    (would your students describe you as an activist? Stanley Fish, critical thinking and nothing else). Critical thinking is not enough. If we really are going to create the conditions for action in whatever the world presents us, and we are going to do it with a degree of dignity, and in a way that we acknowledge that we are bound together, and that we are wholly dependent one on the other, then it is about more than thought – it is about action. I would profoundly come back to the work of Paulo Freire and the work of bell hooks – it’s about love.
    When anger can become all consuming, it is time for me to take some time out, to go to the garden to sit on a rock.

    Categories
    computing education

    Levelling up: sustainability is the epic challenge

    Daniel Pargman

    As the lines between games and reality become blurred, sustainability is the epic challenge

    Dr Daniel Pargman is from Stockholm’s KTH where he holds several roles in the School of Computer Science and Communication, the Department of Media Technology and Interaction, and is associated with the Centre for Sustainable Communication. He teaches courses on the Future of Media, and on Social Media Technologies.

    A specialist in virtual communities, particularly those in games, Daniel has another side, a deeply sustainable side that until recently he kept hidden in the manner of Clark Kent. We explore how these two personas and professional lives are increasingly becoming integrated.

    This is the last in a series of four on  the interplay of gaming and sustainability.

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    adventure education tourism

    Outdoor leadership as sustainability

    Andy Thompson [ 59:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    Andy Thompson is prorgamme manager of outdoor leadership at Otago Polytechnic. He quite possibly has the best job in the world. And he does it with an activist’s eye for sustainability.

    Shane’s number of the week: 20. All of the world’s energy needs could be provided for solely by wind power, according to new research from the Carnegie Institute and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

    Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Is anyone else struggling with the giant light poles and really ugly fence appearing along the West Harbour shared path (cycleway)? While we appreciate the cycleway tremendously, the way it is being built seems quite short-sighted. The poles and fence are separating residents both physically and aesthetically from our beautiful harbour. To really value our city we need to see the whole landscape as the place we live and enhance connections between people and our place. What we’ve now got seems have instead to have focussed solely on engineering utility (with approval from the DCC: ODT 12/12/11). I realise that this is a NZTA project but I’d like to see the Dunedin City Council take more responsibility for the guardianship of our place.