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…

Learning versus Algorithms

Learning in the Age of Algorithms

This is a contemporary chapter in our new book Digital Learning looking across the landscape of learning in the current, arguably, Age of Algorithms and of so-called Artificial Intelligence. We will particularly focus on issues raised in The Master Algorithm (Pedro Domingos 2015) around learning models and the future of learning.

We disagree on the definition of “learners” presented by Domingos;
learners are learners, not theories of learning.

We need to develop learner-centric NOT algorithms-based learning models in the 21st century. Domingos identifies 5 “scientific” theories of learning algorithms and presents them “dialectically” and so capable of improvement by the theorist (and by him alone).

Diana Laurillard: The Conversational Framework – an approach to Evaluating e-Assessment Patterns in Terms of Learning Theory from Yishay Mor

In her Conversational Framework Professor Diana Laurillard presents 4 approaches to framing learning models, in order to stimulate thoughts about learning design, but offers them for reflection and adaptation. We prefer Laurillard’s process of modelling learners but believe that the 5th dimension of “Rhizomatic Learning” needs to be added to her framework in order to enable the learner to take the final decision on what has been learnt, and so produce a learner-centric framework to support learning design. Furthermore I would argue that we have already done this with our Emergent Learning Model, so I would argue that the answers are already here, we are just asking the wrong questions…

Emergent Learning Model from London Knowledge Lab

Our forthcoming book Digital Learning Architectures of Participation, which this blog is designed to support, will also work from ideas developed on the Learning in the Age of Anger blog, which look at a range of contemporary issues affecting the learning offer (such as the climate strike demand for a green curriculum). We are looking at what education in the 21st century might look like if we design learning based on;

the optimism of the learners
NOT
the pessimism of the educators

More on Digital Learning Architectures of Participation in Before and After Institutions

Before and After Institutions from London Knowledge Lab

Full chapter now available in our book Digital Learning: Architectures of Participation

Digital Learning from London Knowledge Lab