The Optimism of the Heutagogs

The Brainery as Resource

Eighteen months ago, on World Heutagogy Day 2022, Vijaya Bhanu Kote launched her heutagogy Primary School the Heutagogy Brainery. This was 100 years after AS Neill launched his Summerhill school and, personally I think of Vijaya as a digitally-enabled 21st Century AS Neill. Not because she was inspired by Summerhill but, rather like Neill in A Dominies Log, she was informed by watching how her children learnt. Unlike Neill in his small quiet village in Scotland she found resources about Heutagogy and learning agency on the Web and, believing she had permission to develop a learner-centred approach to learning, she began developing her version of Heutagogy in her school, which ultimately culminated in the Brainery.

In recent discussions with Vijaya, her Heutagogs and their heutagogic parents I realised that another lens with which to view the Brainery by was our earlier Community Development Model of Learning. From research into existing digital community learning centres in 2002, we had discovered that effective community learning centres (in England) both evolved and improved in tandem with the human communities that they served. John Cook, who carried out this research, called this the lifecycles model of the learning centre, and he argued for a dynamic, responsive learning institution not a static, rigid, one trapped in the pedagogy of content-delivery.

This community-centred curriculum is another way of describing a human-centred approach to learning; arguably an Andragogy approach in that it comes out of negotiations with a community of people active in the learning centres activities. These are not only about learning but also represent a value, or need, of the community that the centre serves, in some specific way. John Cook described this as the hook; the attractor that made the centre inviting to the community that it was a part of. The attractor is a value in itself; it might be a creche, it might be a football team. The attractor then also shaped the evolution and development of the centre which would evolve in line with the interests of those people who attended and shaped the purpose of the centre and thereby its lifecycle.

Learning Architecture of Participation (AoP); to Nigel Ecclesfield and I this lifecycle model represents a learning AoP in which those attending and taking part in the learning offer are actually the subjects of the learning process, not the objects by which the institution measures and manages its performance. So the curriculum, or what people choose to learn in such a centre, evolves dynamically depending upon who turns up. Another aspect of the lifecycle model is that, almost like medieval guilds and their apprentice model, people who go evolve from having an erratic, occasional attendance just watching from the sidelines (or browsing the centres’ activities), to being part-time learners, then to full-time learners, to part-time assistants, to full-time assistants and, in some cases, employees. We called them trusted intermediaries; because they have earned the trust of those who attend due to their involvement with centre activities. Clearly at the Brainery and in her local community in Andhara Pradesh, Vijaya is highly trusted and significantly, in return, she trusts both her heutagogs and their parents in a wonderful virtuous circle of learning…

Ecologies of Learning in Architectures of Participation

Digital Learning: Architectures of Participation; Our Book

Today Friday 24th July 2020, Fred and I will see our book “Digital Learning: Architectures of Participation” published. You can see full details of the book at the IGI Global book web page.

Two chapters and further discussion are devoted to the key concept of Architectures of Participation and, at its simplest, our argument can be summarised in relation to teachers as follows;

“Traditionally, teachers and lecturers derive their confidence from their subject expertise as they develop their teaching practice, so we also need to allow for agency in teachers, which we see as developing their own unique craft professionalism. Both learning and teaching expertise needs to be scaffolded into practice over time and through this we can see the transformation of our education infrastructures into learning infrastructures in line with our principle of “adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks.”

The 3 E’s Model: We think this transformation will come from educational institutions having a three-level operational plan involving “Enabling” learning platforms, “Evaluating” learning practice and “Exploring” the ecology of learning resources and learning tools in an organisational co-creation model.” Ecclesfield and Garnett (2020) p xviii

Teacher Agency: Sitting alongside this conception of teacher agency is our perception of learning institutions based on learner agency, which we develop across other chapters i.e. Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 9 & 10 and immanently throughout the book.

In this post I would like to look at how Luckin’s concept of the “ecology of resources“, utilised in the Open Context Model of Learning (Luckin et al, 2010) relates to the ideas we have been developing around Architectures of Participation in the book and develop our most recent ideas in this context. The two starting points with Rose Luckin’s work on ecologies of resources are her  paper in 2008  Luckin R (2008) and her book “Redesigning Learning Contexts: Technology-Rich, Learner-Centred Ecologies (2010).

Luckin’s conception of ecologies of resources is rich and, as elaborated in the book, demonstrates her grounding in Vygotsky’s work and her work within different learning settings, particularly schools and higher education, where she introduced and developed “technology rich, learner-centred ecologies and explored both how learners learned and how technology could support and enhance learning.

Within ecologies of learning there are learners (as individuals) situated among three, key, sets of resources;

1. Tools and People
2. Environment
3. Knowledge and skills

How learners relate to and interact with these resources is often influenced by others e.g. teachers and they and others frame the learning experience; Luckin uses the term ‘filters’ Luckin (2010) pp93-4 for actions by resources (particularly people), which influence how learners access and utilise particular resources, although these filters may now come to be applied by AI (see Luckin (2018)). These filters may often be operative in relation to the activity of the teacher, influencing how they conceive lesson topics, schemes of work or the curriculum which are, in turn, governed by the management of the institution providing the learning, and beyond, by national government and supra-national bodies whose work seeks to influence education e.g. OECD through its PISA assessment activities. This is not to ignore other sources of filters such as the learners’ peers, parents, communities and faiths whose influence is much less formal, but nevertheless present to learners and teachers/More Able Partners to influence the content and experience of learning.

Rose Luckins Ecology of Resources; learner, more able partner, surrounded by world wide ecology of resources

Within an ecology of resources the learner is the focus of the ecology and may influence that particular ecology, particularly in their interaction with the people in the ecology who are present to the learner, or in interaction with the intelligent AI agents envisaged as becoming a significant part of a learner’s experience in Luckin’s later work e.g. Luckin (2018). In Luckin’s model of an ecology of resources as she elaborates it

The Optimism of the Learners

THE OPTIMISM OF THE LEARNERS
NOT
THE PESSIMISM OF THE EDUCATORS

Our book Digital Learning Architectures of Participation had its genesis when a group of British people who had built a prototype social network in 2002, a “Facebook” before Mark Zuckerberg had started coding ConnectU at Harvard for the Winklevoss twins, asked themselves the question “what would learning look like in a post Web 2.0 world?”

Having tried to build our digital future we recognised that we were moving into a Web 2.0 world and, as Hazel Henderson had said in 1984 “technology is the essence of politics” so the future of learning would be shaped by the emerging and evolving new technologies in the orbit of Web 2.0. In “What is Web 2.0?” O’Reilly had delineated some of the elements of Web 2.0, the participatory web, which has been described elsewhere as the Read/Write Web.

It would mean “web as a platform” it would mean “permanent beta” and it would mean building “architectures of participation” This book looks at these three core Web 2.0 ideas, and much more besides in terms of the broader aspects of a 21st century digital economy, and asks what it means for learning, and education if we wish to start educating 21st century citizens;

1. “Web as a platform” We interpret this as being about “learning beyond the classroom” and has been well-described in the “Ecology of Resources” model developed by Rose Luckin who sees the whole world as a learning resource in which people collaborate with “more able partners” to learn socially.

Icce2011 final from Rose Luckin

 

2. “Permanent Beta” We interpret as being about an evolving process of developing the education system as we learning more about learning. in our opinion this “emergent” process has been well described by Steven Johnson in his book Emergence. In line the Bologna Process, which looked to integrate “informal, non-formal and formal learning” we re-position the idea of permanent beta with our dynamic, adaptive, “Emergent Learning Model”

Emergent Learning Model from London Knowledge Lab

 

3. “Architecture of Participation” unlike “the institutional no” to digital change as Jeff Bezos describes it , we interpret organisational Architectures of Participation as being about the creation of “the institutional yes” to learning, and Education is really, really, really bad at that. We describe how an digital “e-maturity” model of networked organisational development can be used to create “adaptive organisations working over collaborative networks“.

Architecture of Participation from London Knowledge Lab