(Design) ecologies for learning and practice

In this post I acknowledge the contributions of Schumacher College to current shifts toward life-centred design and ‘design for planet’, show how Schumacher exemplifies the concept of ecologies for learning and practice, and draw out insights of value for our new B.Design in development.

Collapsing and re-organising

In late August 2024 the trustees of Dartington Hall took the decision to close Schumacher College – a progressive college for ecological studies near Totnes, Devon – after 31 years of international reach and influence, albeit at a financial loss. Having fulfilled a long-held wish by attending courses at the college in July, 2023 and January, 2024, I was shocked and deeply saddened. I was not alone, and a grassroots campaign swiftly organised to save Schumacher College by becoming independent of Dartington Hall (a mammoth challenge in-progress).

With a MA in Ecological Design Thinking among its postgraduate courses, Schumacher has been a beacon for me as a designer working with eco-social systems and resilience. I consulted the programme specification often to help me think through my own eco-pedagogy and curriculum work, and to grow my ability to co-create conditions for design students’ transformative learning. On both visits, it was humbling and creatively unsettling to be inverted into a co-learner once more instead of a key person curating and facilitating the learning environment (a challenge after 20-odd years of teaching!).

A pathway into a conifer forest glade known as the Redwood classroom at Schumacher College
The Redwood ‘classroom’ and gathering place at Schumacher College (author image)

Living in community and learning through direct ecological engagement – with the soil and cycles of food production, the surrounding woodland and the River Dart – were typical of both short and longer courses at Schumacher which welcomed diverse participants from near and far. In fact, the further you venture into current discourses of life-centred design and ‘design for planet’, the more advocates you will find who trace back to Schumacher as learners and tutors: transition design (Terry Irwin), regenerative cultures (Daniel Christian Wahl), the underpinning systems view of life (Fritjof Capra), biomimicry (Janine Benyus), and ecosophy of holistic science (Stephan Harding). These examples are but tiny filaments of rhizomatic networks and eco-social enterprises intersecting over decades with the ecovillages, transition towns, permaculture and food sovereignty movements, among others, around the world.

A wooden cart offering fresh produce for sale grown by Schumacher College students
Students’ fresh produce for sale at Schumacher College (author image)

An ecology for learning and practice

What has a niche, small-scale college in the Devon countryside that prized hands-on, ecologically engaged learning got to do with The Open University’s large-scale supported distance learning model, you may well ask! Schumacher College is a learning ecology, and like the OU is more accurately a multitude of learning ecologies that extend far in space and time, constantly in formation, as elaborated by Norman Jackson:

Ecologies for learning and practice have temporal as well as spatial dimensions; they enable the makers to connect and integrate different spaces, resources, tools, situations, relationships, activities, and themselves in ways that they find meaningful and effect various transformations (personal, material, and virtual). They enable makers to connect and integrate their past, present, and future, and connect thoughts and actions experienced in a moment and organise them into more significant experiences of thinking and action. They are the means through which the makers weave their moments into the fabric of a meaningful life … (Jackson, 2020, 87).

Both institutions engage ‘whole person’ learning whether by valuing diverse lived experience and responsiveness to students’ multiple life roles at the OU, or in the ‘head, heart and hands’ learning advocated by Schumacher founder, Satish Kumar. To this, ecologies for learning and practice theorists Ron Barnett (2011) and Norman Jackson (2014), offer the compelling angle of lifewide learning to re-balance the better-known linear trajectory of lifelong learning. The concept of ecologies for learning and practice, and ‘lifewideness’ therein, is rooted in an ecological understanding of life in which all organisms, ourselves included, are indivisible with their environment and function in processes and networks that sustain life. What we call ‘learning’ is a continual process of perceiving, adapting with, and co-developing ourselves and our environments which, through cognition, exist relative to us (Ingold, 2000; Jackson, 2020). We know that formal, accredited learning is only a slice of these wildly messy networks of engagements.

Like our students, we each function within one or more learning ecologies which can be visualised and mapped with the aim of externalising and exploring them for ourselves and with others – integral to our ongoing perceptual and meta-cognitive development (see Jackson’s mapping guide as a starting point). Experimenting, I drew on my Schumacher learning experiences to try out and reflect on Jackson’s methods and their potential value to students studying the new B.Design.

The upshot so far? My interest in (design) ecologies for learning and practice is even stronger because they mirror and accommodate the inescapable complexity and systemic nature of design practices within a reality of expanding existential risk.

Here are some initial suggestions for how learning ecologies could be enabling for students in our new B.Design:

  • A simple, guided mapping approach for students to become conscious of their existing learning ecology, and through creative visualisation to express their interests and values in design;
  • An entry (or re-entry) point into ecological understanding, especially by coupling with personal and collective experiences of biological life and multi-scale life (e.g. via nature connection, care for wildlife, and/or citizen science activities);
  • A toolset for analysing and critically reflecting on one or more practice situations e.g. past, present and projected work/life practice; and
  • A meta-cognitive toolset for students actively imagining, shaping and communicating their learning ecology for portfolio development and professional practice.

Our Design Group’s new B.Design co-development is an ecology for learning and practice in itself, interwoven and intersecting with our diverse individual learning ecologies (my Schumacher learning ecology included). This early work is enlivening my own design practice and transforming how I discern opportunities for its direction. I’m hopeful design ecologies for learning and practice might be transformative for our OU design students too, unfolding in myriad spaces and into risky times ahead.

References

Barnett, R. 2011. Lifewide education: A new and transformative concept for higher education. In N. Jackson (Ed.), Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, education and personal development (pp. 22-38). Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse.

Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.

Jackson, N. 2014. Lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges: Concepts and conceptual aids. In N. Jackson & J. Willis (Eds.), Lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges. Accessed 1 October, 2024: https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/uploads/1/3/5/4/13542890/chapter_a1.pdf

Jackson, N. 2020. Ecologies for learning and practice in higher education ecosystems. In R. Barnett & N. Jackson (Eds.). Ecologies for learning and practice: Emerging ideas, sightings, and possibilities. London: Routledge, 81-98.


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3 responses to “(Design) ecologies for learning and practice”

  1. Nicole Lotz avatar
    Nicole Lotz

    The ‘whole person’ approach and ‘head, heart and hands’ learning really resonate with me, especially in the context of OU practices. It would be great if we could incorporate your broader ideas about learning ecologies into the BDes program.

    Your mention of mapping reminds me of the support mapping used in therapeutic settings. It’s interesting to consider how this might apply to learning ecologies. Typically, the individual is at the centre of these maps, but I’m curious – do you think this would be different in learning ecology mapping?

    I’m currently reading “The Reality Bubble” by Ziya Tong. Are you familiar with it? The book looks into what we often miss or fail to perceive because it’s either on a different scale or hidden from us in various ways. This got me thinking – how might we incorporate different scales and ‘invisible worlds’ into learning ecology mapping? It seems like there could be some fascinating connections there.

    1. Wendy Fountain avatar
      Wendy Fountain

      Jackson’s mapping does centre the learner (which I once questioned as perhaps antithetical to my own aims of growing collective ecological consciousness), but, no, the learner is centred as indivisible within their environment/s. I think this actually makes the learning ecologies (LE) approach really well-aligned with support mapping as the supports can be identified via the past-future dimensions of the LE: relationships, resources, spaces & places, contexts, processes/activities and affordances. And once mapped, these can be grown and updated with such supports.

      I will definitely follow up Ziya Tong’s work, thanks, Nicole!

  2. Emma Dewberry avatar
    Emma Dewberry

    Wendy – thank you for such a thoughtful and inspiring post and for drawing on the thread of Lifewide, in contrast to lifelong, learning. As a past Schumacher learner I empathise with its values of ‘being’: of situated learning and the opportunity it presented to be in a place, with others, in a slice of time, teasing out our learning, mutually and also in respect to our own experiences and practices. If we can aim to harness that sensibility in the scale of OU learning and acknowledge and navigate ‘wildly messy engagements’ as our learning landscapes, then I think we have a good chance of exploring Lifewide learning in our design qualifications in unique and valuable ways. Thank you for your amazing contributions to exploring these foundations of design and learning ecologies that we can build from.

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