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Event-based Learning

Urmadic Education and the Pedagogy of Sustainment

by Rebecca Barnett

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a 'pedagogy of sustainment' through elaborating the strategy of event-based learning. It begins with a brief explanation of Sustainment, and why its realisation requires a new pedagogic strategy. The concept of Urmadic education is also explored, focussing on the way in which this can be implemented and developed.

This paper is part of a larger, ongoing study, a component of which proposed a program of event-based learning, centred on craft and reskilling, to the South Bank Corporation in Brisbane, Australia. This is part of a wider strategy to make this part of Brisbane more able to sustain.

Sustainment can be defined as a post-Enlightenment project that goes beyond sustainability. Sustainment is about making time1 through creating a new culture around design as a 'counter force to defuturing - a product of the world of modernity that the Enlightenment brought into being.'2 Sustainment differs from sustainability in its recognition that structural unsustainability is an ontology that has become elemental to modernised human being.3 To move beyond this requires major directional political and economic change.4 This paper argues the necessity of this redirection being undertaken, in part, through education.

In order to establish the argument for the necessity of a pedagogy for advancing Sustainment, the failures of institutionalised education are reviewed alongside the pedagogic aims of Sustainment. To further the case for the use of event-based learning within a 'pedagogy of Sustainment' the theory and practice behind event-based learning in its existing form is explored. This is then compared and contrasted with recommendations for change made by educational philosophers. The conclusion drawn is the need for a 'pedagogy of Sustainment' to be further advanced and implemented. The next stages of this project require the development of workshops based on the recommendations made within this paper.


Understanding event-based learning

Event-based learning is a pedagogic strategy that goes under a variety of names: situated learning; project based learning; and to some extent, experiential learning. While much research has been done on this pedagogic method and its benefits, it is a strategy that is still largely misunderstood and resisted.5 Lave and Wenger describe situated learning as 'emphasis on comprehensive understanding involving the whole person rather than 'receiving' a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity in and with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other.'6 Similarly Paulo Freire writes, 'in problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.'7 This is in opposition to the banking concept of education where knowledge is treated as 'a gift upon those [the student] whom they [the educator] consider to know nothing'8 and which Freire believes acts to 'minimise or annul the student's creative power'.9

Education and Sustainment

In teaching questions have been forgotten. Teachers and students alike have forgotten them, and, as I understand it, all knowledge begins from asking questions...
I have the impression – and I don't know whether you will agree with me – that today teaching, knowledge, consists of giving answers and not asking questions.10

Currently most of us are educated by means of the banking concept of education. The banking concept does not allow freedom of inquiry or praxis; this prevents the student, in Freire's eyes, from being truly human11 and from exercising their intellect. For this and other reasons, education in its current form fails to deliver critical minds. The modern university for example, instead of being an institute for the pursuit of knowledge, has become a business-like institute for the pursuit of a career. Here students have become consumers12 and schools have become 'a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society'.13 Through situating the student as consumer rather than as someone who wants to think14 universities become responsible for graduating students who conform to the status quo. By becoming instrumental, education, especially higher education, 'fails to deliver actively critical minds able to grasp and engage what needs to be known and learnt'.15 Without the ability to criticise the status quo and challenge certainties, humanity will fail to move out of its defuturing epoch towards an age of Sustainment. Furthermore, if an engagement with praxis is critical to the future of humanity16 and 'education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform'17 then it is necessary for pedagogy to reflect this.

For us to unlearn the thinking that causes us to hold on to and behave with a defuturing ontology, and as education is indivisible from the process of change, the modes and methods of education must change. To develop Sustainment and create pathways to the future it is necessary for humanity to think in a different way. People do not choose to act unsustainably; the structure of the world that we come into and exist within educates and enables us to act that way. In order for another way of learning, thinking and acting to come into being the structure of education must change. As Maturana and Varela write 'we do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist.'18 Education, if carried out in a way that reveals the structures of our reality holds the potential to allow people to 'see' the unsustainable for what it truly is. It then becomes possible to direct people towards a more sustain-able existence. Dewey writes that 'the school system represents not thinking but the domination of thought by the inertia of immemorial customs.'19 To move away from customs that allow us to act unsustainably and towards something new it is necessary for someone to have the 'imagination to get away from the 'thought' of the existing easily recognised pattern.'20 This is relevant both in terms of the need for a new way of being and the need for a new way of educating. For Sustainment to advance, a new kind of learning must come into being; learning that develops praxis.

The benefits of event-based learning

Current criticism of event-based learning is both theoretical and prosaic.21 Further development of event-based learning as a pedagogic strategy of Sustainment does not mean that it will have pedagogic exclusivity; only that it has many benefits to the furthering of Sustainment. Additionally much of the philosophy surrounding event-based learning aligns itself with many of the principles of Sustainment. Freire, for example, writes:

The student must discover the living, powerful, dynamic relation between work and action, between word, action and reflection. Thus, by using concrete examples of students' own experience in the course of a morning's classroom work, in the case of a class of school children, we can encourage them to ask questions about their own experiences, and the answers will then include the experience which gave rise to the question. Acting, speaking and discovering would all belong together.22

What Freire describes sets the student on a path to being capable of praxis. In our current times this engagement with praxis is critical.23 Praxis is vital in furthering Sustainment as it will lead, by example and appropriation, to a new ontology.

Studies of problem-based learning (a pedagogic strategy used within university education akin to event-based learning) suggest it results in 'immeasurable progress in developing transferable skills, i.e. technical expertise, problem-solving, etc.'24 Event-based learning also has the potential to foster communities of practice, recognising that 'activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning' and that 'these systems of relations arrive out of and are reproduced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons.'25 Recognising the importance of, while at the same time remaking, community is one of the underlying principles of Sustainment. Therefore a pedagogic strategy that has the furthering of community at its heart is highly valuable to the integration of Sustainment into society. However in order for event-based learning to be fully realised as a pedagogic strategy for Sustainment its implementation needs to be developed. As 'human beings...are modified by every experience'26 it is vital that this implementation provides grounds for true sustain-ability and does not allow Sustainment to become degraded in the same way that sustainability has.


Making event-based learning a sustainment

What is absolutely clear is that the fundamental transformation of education towards understanding and responding to the structurally unsustainable has hardly begun.27

For Sustainment to affect fundamental and lasting change, it must not fall into the trap of using the ''educational' methods employed by the oppressor.'28 As Freire states this leads to a continuation of the status quo where some are oppressed and some are oppressors. Illich goes as far as suggesting that for us to go beyond consumer society we need to understand that 'obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a system, no matter what is taught in them.'29 Consumer society too, is a structure of unsustainable habitus, feeding back into itself. Changing the structures of education and the ontology of the members within this society are the only ways that a new mode of being and a new way of thinking will have a chance to exist. For these reasons a move to a new epoch of education is an imperative to Sustainment. One approach to this is what has been characterised as the third epoch of the university, under the name of the Urmadic University.

Urmadic education

A number of philosophies have led to the development of urmadism30 as a new epoch of human 'being'. One of these is that in order to survive we must adapt.31 This statement is true of all earthly organisms; those that do not adapt face extinction.32 Historically humans have been, and in some cases still are, nomadic. For the last 10,000 years, we have shifted toward life based on agriculture and settlement33. This has left us vulnerable, especially as populations increase, to the impacts of natural events and their more frequent occurrence. The urmadic is where nomadism and settlement enfold into each other.34 Urmadic education is developed on this basis. Event-based learning will be the main structure of this education, due to the benefits and relevance to Sustainment, outlined above. Urmadic education allows learning to occur wherever it is situationally relevant rather than in a set place. This makes learning spaces less vulnerable to climatic, political, social and economic instability.

The Urmadic University is the naming of a praxis that will provide a new form of education, one that allows its 'students', through an ontological designing, not only to critique but also to work on changing, through their own praxis, the unsustainable structure of society. The idea is furthered by the recognition that the institutionalisation of education by the educational system denies the importance and validity of other means of education - through work, leisure, politics and family for example.35 Knowledge, other than that required for the pursuit of excellence36 and the furthering of capitalism37 appears to have lost its value. The Urmadic University is a new way of thinking about education that recognises that learning in the structures of a classroom based on the hegemonic model of capitalist education will only ever be capable of continuing that structure and that this structure has no ability to provide a future for humanity.38 This elaborates Bourdieu's belief that 'the structures constitutive of a particular type of environment...produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.'39 Urmadic education is one step in the process of changing the structures of our current defuturing ontology.

Refusal to sustain the unsustainable

In order for urmadic education to be successful in changing the habitus of enough people to allow Sustainment to develop effectively, its structure must in no way sustain the unsustainable. While his writings are by no means complete guidelines for developing a pedagogy of Sustainment (partly because many of the examples rest on revolutionary education), much can be taken from Freire's work in learning how to construct an urmadic education. Perhaps the most valuable advice is that there must be no interim model of this pedagogy utilising the banking method. 40 This would merely be continuation of the status quo, preventing urmadic education and Sustainment from leading by example.

The pedagogy of Sustainment stands in direct contrast to banking education largely due to the way banking education regards people as objects which instead of producing 'biophily' (the living growth of education) results in 'necrophily'.41 Fromm defines a necrophilous person as someone who 'has the desire to turn the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things ... Memory rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts.' Those with necrophily 'can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it'.42 This view is also apparent in Illich, for example when he says, 'the University thus has the affect of imposing consumer standards at work and at home.'43 While further research would need to be conducted to validate this, necrophily seems to have been one driver of the 2011 London riots, suggesting that Freire's beliefs about the results of banking education are correct. Sustainment sits firmly against the mechanisation of life and the objectification of people. Furthermore necrophily and the desire to have are part of 'defuturing ontologies wherein human centeredness and constructed commodity-based desires combine to create self-realisation as a negation of 'beings together'.'44 This self-interest and anthropocentrism which 'combine to negate both social and biophysical ecologies'45 must be confronted ontologically if progress towards Sustainment is to be made. For these reasons Sustainment cannot use the methods of banking education to enact ontological change.

Freire writes of the complexities of getting 'teachers' to adapt to the new model through the 'creation of a new attitude - that of dialogue, so absent in our own upbringing and education.'46 Teachers need to be capable of stimulating learner's curiosity instead of reinforcing 'a passive, receptive attitude which contradicts the creative act of knowing.'47 Therefore people who take on the role of educators for the Urmadic University or any educational aspect of Sustainment need to have developed some level of alienation from the status quo. It is also important that they have a good comprehension of what Sustainment is and requires. An understanding of how event-based learning sustains in comparison to institutionalised educational models will be an important part of this process. To ensure that what is learnt through urmadic education, and not just by the 'students' but also by the 'teachers', has the ability to enable Sustainment it will be important to reflect on, among other things, the Tree of Ur-phenomena48, this tree of knowledge highlights the important components of Sustainment's dialectic of climate, culture and community including points such as 'reflection upon knowledge and criticality' and 'commonality-in-difference'.49 While this should not become the only guide to urmadic education it is a good starting point, not only because of the relations it allows the viewer to observe.

Within much of his work Freire discusses his theory of education enabling conscientização (Westernised to conscientization); the gaining of a 'consciousness of' and ability to 'action upon' reality.50 This consciousness of, not only a reality, but an ability to act upon this reality is enabled through education:

Although the dialectical relation of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived...it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."51

Freire writes that conscientização is possible, 'only because men's consciousness, although conditioned, can recognise that it is conditioned.52 Similar to conscientização is the concept of turning around, discussed by Heidegger in 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth' as the un-hiding of reality. One of the imperatives of Sustainment is the turning around of a person through ontological design. This ontological design can take many forms including the designing of things that care, redirective practice and, of most relevance to this essay, education. Among some of the areas of knowledge that will be elemental to the Urmadic University for example, are 'transforming how human earthly habitation is understood, initiating a process of re-education (for a world in which urban life becomes fundamentally unsettled as both urban densities and extreme weather impacts increase), developing a new economic paradigm, creating forms of governance appropriate to emergent circumstance, forming cultures able to cope with growing global instability.'53 Further to this, the potential for event-based learning to allow the student to move from 'conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos'54 highlights the importance of event-based learning within a pedagogic strategy for Sustainment.


Implementing the pedagogy of sustainment

I only say that the benefit of such an art cannot be had until a sufficient number of individuals have experimented without its beneficial aid in order to provide its materials. And what they need above all else is the creatively courageous disposition. Fear, routine, sloth, identification of success, and approbation of others are the enemies that now stand in the way of educational advance.55

There are three levels of particular importance to the development of Sustainment: the notion of 'digging where you stand'; the need for organisational transformation; and the transformation of democracy.56 While the pedagogy of Sustainment must account for all of them, it is necessary to find a place to start. The remainder of this essay develops a pedagogic strategy to educate self-sustainment, with the potential for leading into organisational transformation and transformation of democracy at a later stage.

Somewhere to begin

Illich suggests three purposes for a good education system:

It should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.57

The first two purposes fit well with Sustainment. The first acknowledges that learning is a lifelong activity and the second suggests the implementation of a support community to allow for the sharing of knowledge. Both of these 'purposes' immediately remove levels of institutionalisation from the education process. Urmadic education can support anyone at any stage of their learning by having no fixed place and no set curriculum. The Urmadic University, as a structure, will endeavour to encourage support networks that enable people to share what they know. This will be done through the development of a community using events to attract interested skill holders. These events will also allow for a 'recording' of who wants to share their knowledge.


The events and processes of Urmadic education

As has been outlined in previous papers58 there are six specific event styles used in Urmadic education:

• Flag events draw and attract an audience in order to announce and introduce an idea
• Here events create a sign-post, an orientation around an idea or ideas
• Call events summon interested parties to attend and find out more about a project
• Trek events involve a slow progression
• Bond events involve being 'bonded' to someone else, as an apprentice, in order to learn
• Fast events create an imperative for immediate response

The first three and the last can be utilised to develop a database of who wants to share their knowledge, to expand people's knowledge of Sustainment and to seek out fellow pathfinders. The last three events, as well as 'here events' are where event-based learning can take place.

In Deschooling Society Illich outlines four approaches which he believes enable a person to learn. It is important to recognise that the pedagogic philosophies of Illich, outlined below, have had varying levels of ongoing influence on education, both 'alternative' and mainstream. Examples can be seen within the structure of the Open University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare. Skill share programs such as the Machine Project59 also adopt some of the aspects of Illich's learning webs. Much of this influence remains at a somewhat superficial level and has not led to an overall change in the structure of education and learning. There is much potential for the adaptation and development of these, for the purpose of urmadic education, alongside the events outlined above. Illich's four approaches are:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects – which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose...others can be in daily use...
2. Skill Exchanges – which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.
3. Peer-Matching – a communications network which permits a person to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for inquiry.
4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large – who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with the conditions of their service.60

These four points will develop from events, for example, as mentioned above, a flag event can be used to gather those willing to 'exchange' their skills. As the number of people involved in this process grows a directory of all those willing to share their skills can be developed. There are a variety of different forms this could take which need to be further explored. The development of a Library of Objects would have considerable benefits, placing 'objects' into the context in which they can be used and increasing the extent to which they are understood.

Worth considering alongside Illich's 'learning webs' is the development of information technology (IT) in the thirty years since the initial publication of Deschooling Society. Contemporary IT, especially the Internet, and its widespread accessibility and use, broadens the ways in which 'learning webs' could be implemented. Illich mentions 'addresses' as the method of contacting a person; today most of this would be done through an email address or other online presence. Removing the need for the use of 'fixed' address through the use of the internet links well to the concept of Urmadic education; education with no fixed address.

Example: prefiguring an event-based learning context

The following brief example attempts to close the gap between the ambitions declared above and the familiarity perceived in existing models of event based learning; it is part of a wider program of praxis currently being taken as part of the Craft Futures project. Craft can be defined as activities where, in making, an articulated relation between hand and mind secures a direct human presence within the made and as an 'artifice with care that brings something that cares into being'.61 For this reason growing food, while not traditionally recognised as such, can be considered a craft.

Learning to Grow

For urban populations, food production has become increasingly dematerialised. Encouraging the urban growing of food has the potential to increase the ability of city populations to be sustained, as well as "recovering the vast numbers of pockets of agricultural land within the urban fabric".62 Making cities more capable of growing food, by teaching gardening skills, has many benefits such as locality, seasonality, nutritional value linked to freshness and increased understanding of the "connection between the care of the biophysical environment and care of self".63

Establishing classes on growing food would require finding people interested in learning how to grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs. At this point a 'Library of Objects' relevant to growing food could also begin to be developed. Following this a suitable space would need to be found, this could be on disused land, within an existing allotment or in someone's yard; if space is an issue raised beds could be created. Finding the space would be an important component of the learning. Teaching people to find usable agricultural space within the fabric of a city is an important component in creating an ontological shift: opening up to the learner a new way of utilising disused space. During this process the reasons why it is important to utilise these spaces can be discussed.

As growing is not instantaneous, with many plants taking a number of months from sowing to being ready for harvesting the process of learning to grow would take the form of a trek event. Learners would begin by planting seeds suitable for the climate and time of year and come back to tend to the growing plants. Eventually they would be able to harvest them. During the classes, whilst remaining in the situated environment that the growing is occurring in, students would be encouraged to think critically about the issues connected to mainstream farming and what this means for our food security in the future. As well as providing the learner with the skills to grow their own food an imperative to do so is created. The student, through guided practice and experience is ontologically designed to regard growing food as something that they are capable of doing. The student through this program of event based learning becomes more able to sustain themselves.

The success of re-engaging communities through the growing of food and the ontological shift this causes can be further observed through the success of Incredible Edible Todmorden64. What this learning process aims to achieve is not only to teach learners how to grow through taking them through the physical process of doing so but to establish mindsets that enable them to keep doing so, potentially involving others from within their immediate community.

What this example aims to display is that event based learning, if appropriated correctly, has the potential to grow and trigger change. Dewey, Friere and Illich recognised education's transformative agency, its ability to change modes of being, but never named this as a process of ontological design. What is named by ontological design is that all human beings design; prefiguring our actions and makings. This designing, designs us; we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.65 Through learning by doing, within this context, the activity that is learned becomes a structure of the learners mode of being that continues to guide the way they act in and on the world.


Conclusion

In order for Sustainment to come into being we must begin a process of unlearning, relearning and new learning. This paper has argued the need for the implementation of a pedagogic strategy that will enable this. This will encourage, through being capable of 'doing', effective action (in the form of praxis) towards redirection, engendering, at an ontological level, an ability to sustain. Developing and implementing the concept of Urmadic education through the use of event-based learning in the form of events, workshops and hothouses will be a vital component in this process. This is due to the way that event based learning has the ability to create value shifts within learners. Through engaging with and acting on the world it becomes evident that the world is not a static reality but instead a reality that people have the ability and tools to transform; Issues have also been raised as to how a pedagogy of Sustainment is formed observing the criticisms and warnings from philosophers of education, and developing these further to consider the needs and capabilities of 'today'. An ongoing reflection on the impact that this pedagogic strategy will have on the future is also necessary.

A call to action

The next steps of this process require further investigation and praxis. Learning events on 'skills that are able to sustain' need to be established. 'Learning webs' suited to this process need further research and implementation. These processes require full and ongoing critiques in order to ensure that they are not sustaining the unsustainable or causing other, unforeseen damage. Further research needs to be conducted to determine what needs to be un-learned, re-learned and newly learned. This would establish event based learning around what needs to be known to successfully move into the future including ways to transform the status quo. This all requires a semi-coordinated effort by Design Futurers worldwide, beginning within our own communities.




last modified 20120625