Sub-brand to go here
The Future of Learning is Lifelong,
Lifewide and Open:
some challenges for the Ecological
University
(and even some for lifewide learning)
Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
Learning Lives conference, Birkbeck, 26 March 2014
Centre for Higher
Education Studies
Lifelong, lifewide and open – starting
point
o A concern for individuals, for them to be able to author
their own lives
o - and since this is a continuing project of self-becoming
o - and since education can help
o Education has to be available through the lifespan and
allow connections across the individual’s learning
experiences
o So, lifelong and lifewide – and open (readily available).
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A philosophical analysis
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LW & LL learning - an educational philosophy of perpectual becoming
Individuals can be self-generating (beyond merely being in the world)
A philosophy of educational self-immanence and personal emergence
Individuals have the resources to generate and re-generate their own
subjectivities
A philosophy of openness, of personal openness and pedagogical openness
Due attention is paid to collaboration
But, individuals can – & ultimately have the responsibility to – self-author
themselves
After all, no-one can do that for individuals. Only they can do that for
themselves.
An issue
• It may sound as if this is a project concerned with individuals as
individuals
• It is concerned about their welfare, their needs, their possibilities, their
own learning
• Is this an agenda for late capitalism, in which everyone looks out for
themselves
• - and reconstructs themselves (for a fluid world)
• And goes on developing themselves for themselves?
• Cf ‘Bowling Alone’. A solipsistic educational journey devoid of any
sense of universal claims and possibilities.
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An ecological point of view
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There is a real world – it’s not just a matter of our life-projects
It is a globalised world
And a world riven with conflicts, power differentials, and ideologies
Willy-nilly, we are embedded in networks – antagonistic as they are
A challenge then is that of bringing a (greater) concern for the world
into our learning tasks
• Neither self-centred nor selfish but self-less, not merely immersed in
the world but engaging critically with the world
• - with a care for its flourishing.
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Points of connection
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This then is the issue: to what extent (and how) might the individual’s
connections with the world come into play in the eking out of that
individual’s life-education, her/ his education for her/his life?
NB the problem is complex
For the ecologies in which the individual is held are numerous:
Knowledge
Culture
Social institutions
Economy
Self
The ecological university
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The ecological university takes its embeddedness in the world seriously
- within all of its ecologies (knowledge, institutions, economy, society etc)
Is interested not just in their sustainability or even their well-being but their
improvement and their flourishing.
Is active in the world – intent on world advancement (the university as a
site of critical action)
Higher education - an education for critical & constructive action in world
Students as global citizens – critical, active, constructive (‘critical action’)
Their LW education becomes crucial: an open curriculum but their
discipline/ professional field retains a key part.
Conclusions: Challenges before the
ecological university and lifewide learning
 What is to be the relationship between the univ curriculum
and the student’s LW education?
• How is the student to be brought up against the ‘real world’
and confront its messiness
• And helped to develop the human qualities for engaging
with the world, with its power structures & antagonisms?
• How is the student to be enabled to develop an active
sense of her/his relatedness to the world
• And come to be an active, critical but constructive actor in
and across the world?
• Formidable questions – to which we have hardly glimpsed
the answers. So there is much work to be done.
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