{"id":5429,"date":"2024-10-07T08:21:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T08:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=5429"},"modified":"2024-10-07T08:21:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T08:21:48","slug":"design-ecologies-for-learning-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/design-ecologies-for-learning-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"(Design) ecologies for learning and practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post I acknowledge the contributions of Schumacher College to current shifts toward life-centred design and \u2018design for planet\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

Collapsing and re-organising<\/span><\/h2>\n

In late August 2024 the trustees of Dartington Hall took the decision to close Schumacher College \u2013 a progressive college for ecological studies near Totnes, Devon \u2013 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).<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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!).<\/p>\n

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The Redwood ‘classroom’ and gathering place at Schumacher College (author image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Living in community and learning through direct ecological engagement \u2013 with the soil and cycles of food production, the surrounding woodland and the River Dart \u2013 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 \u2018design for planet\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

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Students’ fresh produce for sale at Schumacher College (author image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An ecology for learning and practice<\/span><\/h2>\n

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\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

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 \u2026<\/em> (Jackson, 2020, 87).<\/p>\n

Both institutions engage \u2018whole person\u2019 learning whether by valuing diverse lived experience and responsiveness to students\u2019 multiple life roles at the OU, or in the \u2018head, heart and hands\u2019 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<\/strong> learning<\/strong> to re-balance the better-known linear trajectory of lifelong learning. The concept of ecologies for learning and practice, and \u2018lifewideness\u2019 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 \u2018learning\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 integral to our ongoing perceptual and meta-cognitive development (see Jackson\u2019s mapping guide as a starting point<\/a>). Experimenting, I drew on my Schumacher learning experiences to try out and reflect on Jackson\u2019s methods and their potential value to students studying the new B.Design.<\/p>\n

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

Here are some initial suggestions for how learning ecologies could be enabling for students in our new B.Design:<\/p>\n