Archive for May, 2020

Personalising knowledge with hyperbooks

Sunday, May 24th, 2020

“How about the American classroom? Our method of teaching hasn’t radically changed over the past century. It’s stuck, it’s dated, and it’s in need of radical transformation. While there are bright spots in the private school system, the public education system–where the vast majority of our children are being taught, guided, and motivated–is a dated, bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic dinosaur. It lost sight and understanding of its consumer a long, long time ago.”

Shawn Parr


1 Historical context

Our current education system, built on the Industrial Revolution model, focuses on IQ, in particular memorization and standardization, skills that will be easily and efficiently supplanted by artificial and augmented intelligence (AI), where IQ alone isn’t sufficient. A good blend of IQ (intelligence) + EQ (emotional intelligence) + RQ (resilience) is critical to unleashing a student’s potential.  The latter is particularly relevant to the uptake of individualised distance learning. 

In 1979 Professor Denis Bellamy, a UK advocate for educational reform, created a network of educators and organisations who were exploring new ways of handling and communicating cross-subject knowledge about the use of natural resources for human production (natural economy). This developed during the 1980s in the Natural Economy Research Unit (NERU) within the Department of Zoology of the National Museum of Wales, which was funded by the education directorate of the EU.  One of NERU’s first contracts was a consultancy to help produce a new examination syllabus about world development for the Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicate.  It was promoted as the subject natural economy within the Syndicate’s International GCSE.

From 1992 NERU’s educational projects focused on new opportunities arising from the Rio Environment Summit to work with Welsh and English schools and their communities to create citizen’s environmental networks for democratic participation in local economic development. This work was centred on the use of educational IT tools to promote systems thinking about ‘sustainability’. The belief was that a new hybrid model of education would eventually emerge, for individualised collaborative learning with significant benefits to society.   

An important practical outcome was the Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network (SCAN), which is now an integral part of the education/ interpretation work of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. Current projects are concerned with packaging classroom resources, which have been produced and tested by teachers, to embed environmental education in the Local Agenda 21. SCAN makes the resources freely available on-line to help bring the study of systems for resource management off the sidelines of the National Curriculum.

The Cambridge natural economy project led to the production and testing of an self-navigating cross curricular knowledge system. This is applied as a text-based computer format for voyaging the global issues, problems and challenges of population, business, and natural resources. Formatted on Longman-Logotron’s pioneering ‘Hyperbook’ software, it was used in 1994-96 as a basis for groups of teachers, and their sixth form pupils, to begin producing educational models of the relationships of jobs to local resources. 

The hyperbook system for localised learning germinated  from a discussion between Colin Tubbs (English Nature), Denis Bellamy (National Museum of Wales and the Countryside Council for Wales), and Emma Wrigglesworth (the New Forest Committee/New Forest Museum). The idea was  to produce interactive computer resources for schools focused on the New Forest as an ecological island in an ‘urban sea’. Colin Tubbs agreed to the use of the text of his book, ‘The New Forest; An ecological history’, for this purpose. The aim was for it to be formatted by NERU as a self-indexing programme, and made freely available within the SCAN schools as a cross-curricular exemplar of environmental management. The idea was that Tubb’s text should be cross-referenced by students with hypertext to other relevant materials, particularly with regard to updating.  It became a hyperbook, which at the moment is hosted in a basic format as The New Forest Flip Book by Publitas.

2 What is a hyperbook

A hyperbook is a digital app designed to be strongly related to the book metaphor. Books are the traditional repositories of information and knowledge. People know how to read them, how to use a Table of Contents, how to use an index, etc. By maintaining the same model on screen, people’s access to electronic information can be a representation of the book itself, which can be consulted like a physical book. This approach helps to overcome some of the limitations inherent in reading through a computer screen.

In 2003 Gilles Falquet and Jean-Claude Ziswiler published a paper entitled ‘A Virtual Hyperbooks Model to Support Collaborative Learning’.  It was a report on several pedagogical projects exploring the collaborative construction of a scientific hyperbook. They established that the core of a hyperbook is an exposition of a distinct subject presented in a document format as a pdf file’  This core file is freely available and can be customised with annotations, and links made from it, to extension/updating material.  Thus, people can personalise the file without modifying its original content.  Hyperbooks, together with mind maps, wikis, blogs and personal websites comprise the infrastructure for self-learning. As such they are important resources for a humanistic education where the pedagogy is focused on facilitated learning to guide students to create their own personal body of knowledge.  A hyperbook allows each learner to build this unique understanding using hypermedia elements (texts, images, audio, video, animations) which are stored in a modularized way.

In making a linear document (article or book) a single desired reading order is predefined. Readers always know where they are. When authors are writing a book, and are adding pages, they always know what they may expect the reader to have read when that reader reaches the page being written. However, in hyper documents this assumption is no longer valid. Given a rich link structure there are so many ways to navigate through a hyperdocument that it is impossible for an author to foresee which pages a user will have read when jumping to a certain page. Hyperbooks are a prime example of a type of hyperdocument that is written in such a way that the user can jump to any page, understand the information on that page and see links to other related pages that can also be understood. Users are also compilers so building a hyperbook is a good example of what has been called ‘fingerprint self learning’. 

The teaching objectives of making a hyperbook are:

• to help the students see the relationships that exists between the different concepts presented during a course, hence the hypertextual nature of the book; 

• to give students the opportunity to participate in the collaborative writing of a large electronic document;

• to show that the same subject matter can be seen from different points of view expressed as expressions of multi author creativity;

• to provide an individual with tools to assemble a personal body of knowledge about a subject they are really interested in and communicate it online.

3 An example of how a hyperbook is made?

In 1946, a year-long project was launched by the West Wales Field Society to investigate the wildlife of the small Welsh offshore island of Skomer.  The report on the expedition was compiled by Ronald Lockley and his brother in law, John Buxton, from the field notes of academics and local naturalists who took part in the island expedition.  These notes were the basis of the book ‘Island of Skomer’ edited by Buxton and Lockley, published by Staples Press in 1950.  This book is the core of a Skomer Hyperbook and illustrates problems of assembling an electronic version of a paper book..  

Estimated costs of the island survey amounted to about £3,000, a third of which was to come from grants and the balance from members of the WWFS. There is no information about the circumstances of the publication of ‘Island of Skomer’.  The book carries a notice saying that copyright is reserved.  This is a formality indicating that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for its own use, all the rights provided by copyright law.  However, no individual or organisation has ever claimed copyright of Island of Skomer.  Considering the way in which the Skomer field survey was carried out by a large body of volunteers, in a modern context, ‘Island of Skomer’ would be an item in a commons media file repository.  It  would be available to everyone in the public domain as freely-licensed educational media content (te.g.text, images, sound and video clips).  It is in this spirit, after  extensive and fruitless searching for a copyright holder, that Denis Bellamy and Mike Alexander, a former Warden of the island, launched the Skomer Hyperbook in 2020 as a free educational online resource.

From this point, the core document of The Skomer Hyperbook is a digitised version of ‘Island of Skomer’. It provides a holistic menu and topic scaffold for individuals or groups to express their understanding of the island as a humanistic model of cultural ecology. Indeed, the Skomer Hyperbook emerged as an exposition of evolutionary humanism.  The essence of a humanistic education is to facilitate individuals to build a personal body of knowledge.   

3 Evolutionary humanism

There is no doubt that the pioneer conservationist and President of the WWFS, Julian Huxley, was the driving force behind the 1946 Skomer field survey and its publication.  His vision for the island was an educational resource for the promotion of ‘evolutionary humanism’ by personalising kowledge about the connections between culture and ecology.  He defined this concept in his introduction to the 1961 anthology ‘The Humanist Frame’, as:

“…  a new idea-system, whose birth we of the mid-twentieth century are witnessing, I shall simply call Humanism, because it can only be based on our understanding of man and his relations with the rest of his environment. It must be focused on man as an organism, though one with unique properties. It must be organized round the facts and ideas of evolution, taking account of the discovery that man is part of a comprehensive evolutionary process, and cannot avoid playing a decisive role in it”.

In other words, if you are a Humanist, then accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution as the font of humanity comes with the territory.  Science, not religion, affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces with no supernatural input into its workings or ethics.  It was with this in mind that Huxley promoted the use of Skomer island for outdoor learning adventures into evolutionary humanism. The current quest is to resolve how the evolution of ethics comes to be at the heart of humanity’s response to global warming.  Hypermedia resources, such as a hyperbook, provide the necessary tools to span these two topics that are central to the future of humanity on Earth. 

Unfortunately, Huxley’s vision of Skomer as a cross curricular study centre to promote evolutionary humanism was not realised. He moved on into the international conservation arena as a founder of UNESCO.  Skomer was eventually declared a national nature reserve in 1959, largely because of its crucial position in the survival of the vast numbers of seabirds that nest there.  Now, Skomer is a first class illustration of the current trend of conservationism, where the aim is  to protect the environment for future generations using scientific data backed up with legislation.  Its wider and deeper potential as a holistic focus for educational reform, linking culture with ecology, was largely forgotten until Huxley’s vision for Skomer was revisited by Denis Bellamy and his students who began using the island for place-based learning through adventure in the early 1970s.

It is significant that the first page of ‘Island of Skomer’ is given over to a drawing of the Skomer Vole by the Welsh wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe.  This animal is a distinct subspecies of the mainland vole, which evolved on the island, probably after being introduced by the first human settlers.  In this context, the Skomer Vole can be said to stand as an icon, or emblem, of evolutionary humanism and wildlife protection.  

4 Reverence for life

In Huxley’s mind, the core of evolutionary humanism is that religion is a tool invented to enforce a system of ethics that was already established.  He argued that the direction of moral progress was toward greater human fulfillment and the realization of values that had “intrinsic worth” i.e. the value that something has “in itself,” or “for its own sake”. Only a society that respected individual rights, stressed education, encouraged responsibility, and promoted the arts, could realize those values. In this respect, we have barely scratched the surface to understand how notions of intrinsic value should affect public attitudes toward conservation.  Rather than being a “flimsy notion” that distracts from the development of sound conservation measures, Huxley took the view that the intrinsic value of nature provides a robust and necessary basis for developing a conservation-based relationship with nature.  This expression of reverence for life in all its diversity had emerged in the interwar period.  For example, writing in 1924, Albert Schweitzer summarised the ethics of wildlife conservation as follows; 

“Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.… The time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life”.

Therefore, one of the key papers to be attached to the Skomer Hyperbook was a biography of Schweitzer feely available in the World Heritage Encyclopedia.

Schweitzer’s theme of ‘reverence for life’ was picked up by Rachel Carson in 1962.  She was the ecologist and science writer who campaigned in America against the flagrant use of chemical pesticides. She prefaced her book, ‘Silent Spring’ with a quotation from a letter Schweitzer had written to a beekeeper whose bees had been destroyed by pesticides: 

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth”.  

Through Carson, and others following her path, Schweitzer’s most positive legacy infiltrated the Western ecological movement from the 1960s.  Indeed, Skomer played a role in tracing fatal pesticide residues into food chains.

Julian Huxley’s internationalist and conservation interests led him to choose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for the ethics of wildlife conservation.  He traced his decision to embrace humanism to the evolutionary underpinnings of the early primates, who developed ideas about what was good and bad as it pertained to their flourishing as a species. Morality was birthed in humans from these biological intuitions, and as populations increased, they could no longer depend on smaller communities to govern moral standards. Religion solved this problem, proving to be a successful tool in policing large groups on what was moral and immoral. This goes to show that morality transcends religion as its point of origin. 

Huxley believed that our faculties are capable of deciphering good from evil  but our relationship with religion is such that we misattribute our moral foundations to the divine.  Religions make claims about how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong.  These normative statements and behavioral norms, as well as their meanings, would have been an integral part of social life as experienced by Skomer’s prehistoric farmers.  The norms are an adaptation that evolved in connection with social coordination, cooperation and stability. This capacity involves being in the state of accepting a norm, which we should thus expect to be a standard part of human moral behaviour.

It is relatively easy to see how evolutionary humanism gave meaning to Huxley’s life.  It helped him to engage with the self-questioning, common to all humanity seeking connections between culture and ecology: Who am I? What is my purpose?  What is our place in existence?”

“[Evolutionary humanism] has enabled me to see this strange universe into which we are born as a proper object both of awe and wondering love and of intellectual curiosity. More, it has made me realize that both my wonder and curiosity can be of significance and value in that universe. It has enabled me to relate my experiences of the world’s delights and satisfactions, and those of its horrors and its miseries to the idea of fulfillment, positive or negative. In the concept of increased realization of possibilities, it provides a common measuring rod for all kinds of directional processes, from the development of personal ethics to large-scale evolution, and gives solid ground for maintaining an affirmative attitude and faith, as against that insidious enemy … the spirit of negation and despair. It affirms the positive significance of effort and creative activity and enjoyment. In some ways most important of all, it has brought back intellectual speculation and spiritual aspiration out of the abstract and isolated spheres they once seemed to me to inhabit, to a meaningful place in concrete reality; and so has restored my sense of unity with nature”

There are many institutes devoted to the study of ethics and studies of current ethical issues that range from labour-management relations to human trafficking. We need the arena of cultural ecology to explore ethical issues that may arise in the future at the interface between people and Nature, which are not well understood today. These issues have to be resolved to fully assess and address the 2050 plans for human survival. Hyperbooks are tools for learners to take early steps in that process.

Appendix.  Five simple steps to make a hyperbook

1 Each page of a paper book is scanned to produce a collection of jpeg files, one file per page.  

2 Each jpeg picture file is inserted, in sequence, into the pages of a word processor document using an app such as Word or Google Docs.

3 The document is saved as a pdf file that can be opened in a pdf viewer, such as Adobe Acrobat, and navigated by scrolling the pages up and down. 

4 The pdf file is opened in a pdf editor, such as Pdf Elements, where text, pictures and hotspot links can be added to customise it.

5 Finally, the modified pdf file may be converted to a flip book, using an app such as FlipPDF, which can be navigated by turning pages horizontally left to right and right to left.

Place-based adventure classrooms

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

“We’ve all experienced the power of place: those moments when we’re immersed deeply in experiencing the world around us and what’s happening there is real and meaningful. Learning in these moments is organic and visceral. There’s much to learn from the places we inhabit — from traveling across the globe to getting out into our own communities. Yet, formal learning experiences, that leverage the power of place, remain the exception and not the rule.”  https://www.gettingsmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/What-is-Place-Based-Education-and-Why-Does-it-Matter-3.pdf

1 Adventure-education

Adventure is typically defined as an event involving risk, challenge, and excitement as an out-of-the-ordinary experience.  

Education is a group process of imparting knowledge, values, skills and attitudes to a group, which can be beneficial to an individual.  

Learning is a personal process of self discovery adopting systems, values and  skills to assemble a personal body of knowledge. 

In summary, education is knowledge imparted to a group by a teacher, whereas learning is personal knowledge gained through experience aided by a facilitator.

Therefore there are two kinds of adventure classrooms.  The first kind has a framework to educate by helping people to learn how to do things.  The second kind of adventure classroom supports people to think about what they need to learn as individuals to find their identity in a bigger scheme of things.

2 Education through adventure (ETA)

ETA has taken the form of team/trust building, cooperative games, physical education, and outdoor risk challenges (e.g., high ropes courses, nature and wilderness team activities, expeditionary pursuits). Education through adventure typically occurs within small-group settings, with the learning and experience limited to the small group. While ETA is not restricted to outdoor pursuits, it is often associated with the outdoors and environmental and sustainability education, and is typically employed in formal or informal settings.

In ETA programs, participants are physically or psychologically challenged, with a focus on risk-taking, group problem solving, and individual psychological growth and development . Six specific outcome areas for adventure education are: 

  • leadership, 
  • self awareness, 
  •  interpersonal skills, 
  • and adventuresomeness. 

Formal processing or reflection activities are incorporated into some, but not all, adventure education programs.

3 Learning through adventure (LTA)

LTA  provides a framework for the design of learning experiences that allow individual learners to explore real-world issues through authentic, field-based narratives. Nowadays this takes place within an interactive personalised online learning environment. LTA blends experiential, inquiry-based, and authentic learning, and synchronizes an online learning environment with teacher-led schooling activities.

It is grounded in eight core principles: 

  • a defined issue in a geographical place; 
  • an authentic narrative; 
  • a sound curriculum grounded in inquiry;
  • collaboration and interaction opportunities between learners, experts, teachers, and content; 
  • synchronized learning opportunities that tie together what is learned with a wider curriculum; 
  • an online venue to deliver content; 
  • multiple media that enhance the curriculum; 
  • scaffolding for the facilitators as well as the explorers.

Within an LTA program, a team engages in an exploration centered on a specific location and a menu of social or environmental issues. Individuals choose which issue they would like to research. The team travels out into the field, actually or virtually, to capture authentic data and narratives.  These narratives may be synchronised with a predesigned inquiry-based curriculum tied to that expedition, issue, and location. The field experiences, data, media assets, and observations of individuals are shared online. It is an environment in which learners are able to actively participate and collaborate with the explorers, their peers around the world, their facilitator(s), and a variety of field experts. These online collaboration and interaction opportunities allow learners to form connections between what is happening in the real world and their studies. Learners complete activities related to the real-world events, engage in online and face-to-face discussions encomposing them, and present potential solutions to issues that are raised.

 Fig 1 Learning through adventure as a project-based process

Learning through adventure is a process (Fig 1).  It involves:

  • A facilitator and and a small group of explorers
  • An adventure learning classroom, indoor, outdoor or virtual
  • A menu of issues from which individuals can make a free choice
  • A database
  • An individual’s research plan
  • An online office toolkit
  • A personal website for reporting content and learning outcomes.

4 Examples of place-based adventure learning classrooms

4.1 Place based learning: Skomer Island

Skomer, a small offshore island in South West Wales, played a significant historical role in the development of LTA because it was a focus of Julian Huxley’s idea of evolutionary humanism in the 1930s.  Huxley moved on to become a founder member of UNESCO.  His idea was applied by Denis Bellamy to establish a succession of field courses on Skomer and the adjacent  island of Skokholm, organised on humanistic principles, in the 1970s with university staff facilitators and small groups of students. 

The small group tutorial is one of the cornerstones of adventure learning. By implication then, the role of the tutor/facilitator is of pivotal importance.  This is because student learning depends on the facilitator’s understanding and appreciation of his/her responsibilities to bring out individual needs and leanings for each student.  Student explorers are then left to make a plan for their investigation.  Progress is shared with the group.   Just as the finer details of the implementation of any LTA programme are unique to each institution, so will be the precise expectations of the facilitator. It is therefore necessary to make the expectations of facilitators explicit to staff and students from the outset.

In an ideal situation, where classes are small, the facilitator’s primary role is to ensure there is student learning and interaction during small group sessions. Prior to embracing facilitation, facilitators need to understand and accept the philosophy that underpins project-based learning. Each educator must therefore believe in the benefits of individualised, active, constructive learning and be able to relinquish teaching control. Historically, for the good teacher, this meant explaining such that all students took away the same body of fixed, examinable knowledge, that was really the property of the teacher. So, for many academics, project based learning, as an educational philosophy, questions many of the epistemologies underlying their previous activities in a traditional didactic curriculum.  Therefore, LTA may be met with some resistance. The transition from teacher to facilitator requires faculty to develop staff skills through workshops and perhaps staff incentives.

There are five basic principles of humanistic education which make it particularly suitable for online classrooms and lifelong, place-based learning:

  • Students should be able to choose what they want to learn. Humanistic teachers are facilitators, not disseminators of knowledge. They believe that students will be motivated to learn a subject if it’s something they need and want to know.
  • The goal of education should be to foster students’ desire to learn and teach them how to learn. Students should be self-motivated in their studies with a desire to build a personal body of knowledge on their own and communicate it to their peers.
  • Humanistic educators believe that grades are irrelevant and that only self-evaluation is meaningful because grading encourages students to work for a grade and not for personal satisfaction. In addition, humanistic educators are opposed to objective tests because they test a student’s ability to memorize and do not provide sufficient tutorial feedback to the teacher and student as a learning unit.
  • Humanistic educators believe that both feelings and knowledge are important to the learning process. Unlike traditional educators, humanistic facilitators do not separate the cognitive (knowledge) and affective (attitudes) domains.
  • Humanistic educators insist that classrooms need to provide students with non threatening environments so that they will feel secure to learn. Once students feel secure, learning becomes easier and more meaningful. 

The five basic principles of humanistic education can be summarized as:

1) Students’ learning should be self-directed.

2) Classrooms should produce students who want and know how to learn.

3) The only form of meaningful evaluation is self-evaluation.

4) Feelings, as well as knowledge, are important in the learning process.

5) Students learn best in a non threatening environment.

IT practical work in the context of a humanistic education involves each learner assembling a personal body of knowledge about a particular feature of the local environment backed up with a digital library.  The outcome of the investigation is then presented online as a mindmap delineating connections with, and dependencies on, other features and a wider curriculum. These individual digital presentations thereby become information packages for others to build upon.  An example is the educational framework proposed by Julian Huxley for Skomer. The features contributing to a holistic view of the island are listed in the contents of the book ‘Island of Skomer’ (Table 1), published in 1950 as the report on the first field survey of the island in 1946.

Table 1 Features of Skomer Island suitable for humanistic education projects

History

The Flora

Spring Migration

Land-birds

The Petrels

The Auks

Gulls and Cormorants

Small Mammals

The Atlantic Seal

Marine Biology

Autumn Migration

The Rock Types 

This list can be regarded as the holistic catalogue of a Skomer digital library from which a student can select a feature of its social history, biodiversity, geology or archaeology to assemble a personal body of knowledge that can be displayed on line (Fig 2; Table 2).

Fig 2 A humanistic mind map for navigating from a personal body of knowledge about Skomer’s  Puffins to enter the wider context of a syllabus about global warming

Table 2  Four examples of websites created collaboratively by Skomer explorers. 

Skomer: a Mind Map

Skomer: a Knowledge Island

Rescue Mission Planet Wales

Global Warming

International Classrooms Online

The nearest that current formal education comes to Julian Huxley’s ecological humanism is the Engaged Ecology MA at Schumacher College.  This is a radical experiment in embodied learning. The programme invests learning with a deeply immersive connection to place, to give students the tools they need to take meaningful action in the world. By taking first-hand authentic experience as the very foundation for learning, and enriching it with more traditional academic reflection, engaged ecology encourages students to develop solutions-based practices to discover for themselves how best to approach the world’s seemingly intractable ecological and social challenges.  Engaged ecology asks three fundamental questions to be answered by all place based learning activities : What is place? Who are we? And, what, then, can we do?

4.2 Place based learning: extreme rurality

At the turn of the present century, Mark K Smith,writing for the website INFED explored the significance of ‘association’.  He defined association as joining together in companionship to undertake some task using the educative power of volunteering to play one’s part in a group or association. He drew upon the work of Konrad Elsdon and his colleagues, who in the early 1990s, undertook a large scale survey of British local voluntary organizations. They highlighted the sheer scale of commitment. Around 12 million women and men were involved in running 1.3 million bodies.  These were what we might describe as, ‘small democracies’ with tremendous educational potential.

There was a “… great range of learning, change and satisfaction over and above those which are deliberate, inherent in the organization’s objectives, and expected by their members. The one which was given priority almost universally, and reported as being of greater importance than the content objective of the organization, is quite simply growth in confidence, and its ramifications and secondary effects of self-discovery, freedom in forging relationships and undertaking tasks, belief in oneself and in one’s potential as a human being and an agent, and ability to learn and change both in the context of the organization’s objectives and in others.”

On the other hand R. D. Putnam, in his 1990’s book , ‘Bowling Alone’, marshalls groundbreaking evidence to argue there has been a decline in ‘social capital’ in the USA.  He charts a drop in associational activity and a growing distance from neighbours, friends and family. Crucially he explores some of the possibilities that exist for rebuilding social capital to develop a sense of identity and  belonging. This need is particularly acute in rural communities, exhibiting extreme rurality. It relates primarily to areas that have a very low population density, where monoculture agriculture and related activities usually dominate the landscape and economy, and places where transport and communications need to cover very large distances making travel and service provision relatively difficult and costly.  Low associational activity fuels outward migration.

The rebuilding of rural social capital was the goal of an EC funded project of the 1980s called BIOPLEX.  This was based in the small Suffolk village of Chediston, which in those days, despite its extreme rurality, was a significant centre for local agricultural innovations to increase farm efficiency and minimise pollution. The project was mostly concerned with the economics of farm anaerobic digesters and the final report is now regarded as a classic milestone in this research area. However, a particular section of the EC’s protocol was to make a preliminary assessment of the future role of PC technology in the home-to-home networking of innovation within and between village communities. But before that could happen there had to be a process of place-shaping in order for people to become as one with their environment. Although the project was managed from the University of Wales, a local genealogist, living in Chediston volunteered to spread the word and organise digital resources and PC training to order.  Otherwise, the villagers were left to their own devices to produce local stories in the context of agreeing some common threads of social history that unified the villages. 

The first work produced was ‘Blything.  Blything is an ancient division of the county of Suffolk called a hundred. Some historians believe that Blything denotes ‘the people of the Blyth’, a tribal grouping of the Iceni, one of the first gatherings of pre-Roman families that colonised the valleys of the River Blyth.   The aim was to assemble a living history of the people of the Blyth in terms of past and present land management, the patterns of work and settlement and their hopes for the future.  Later, nine villages in the adjacent hundred of Wangford joined the project, now known as Blything and Nine Parishes (BANP). Above all, BANP was a bottom-up general model for people everywhere to attain a sense of place. The outcome is a collection of web sites which have long been available online as an international education resource in cultural ecology, receiving thousands of unique visitors a year. 

Smith’s INFED essay highlighted the factors limiting the take up of self education which were certainly revealed in the BANP project.  BANP was set in the informal learning of everyday life in contrast to the specified curriculum objectives of the life of a school or college. This distinction between ‘natural societal setting’ and ‘formal instructional setting’ is expressed as the everyday world of individual experience  in the family, at work, at play.  Formal education an ‘educational agent’ takes on responsibility for planning and managing instruction so that the learner achieves some previously specified objective. Smith feels that we have to be careful with the idea of ‘educational agents’. On a narrow definition they could be considered to be people only in the employ or under the jurisdiction of recognized educational institutions, who have as their prime task enabling people to assimilate an imposed body of knowledge. This would seem to be an unnecessarily restrictive definition given the sort of situations where people do much of their BANP type learning. We know for example that this leads to failure when local authority planners drive community development from the top down.  

Smith thinks it is probably more productive to take ‘educational agents’ to be anyone who consciously helps another person to learn – whether that help is given directly or takes the form of creating an appropriate environment to facilitate personal learning.

The Parham Millennium Parish SCAN is an example of how small rural communities can be left alone to develop an idea bottom up, which puts their village on the map. It was an ‘overspill’ from BANP. Parham village is only a few miles from Chediston.

This is how the project was seen by Parham’s villagers.

“… the Parish Council invited Professor Denis Bellamy, Ruth Downing (Prof. Bellamy’s Local Assistant) and Trevor Gibson (Suffolk Coastal District Council’s representative) to an open meeting held on 3rd February 1998 to explain the principles of producing a Parish Scan. We hoped that as many people as possible in the village would be able to contribute information for the project. A specially formed ‘Millennium Committee’ would be responsible for the organising, formatting and publication of material. It was to be a pioneering exercise as we were the first village nationally to undertake such a project.” 

BANP had shown that there must be strong local leadership and a widespread feeling feeling that the goal is worth attaining.  For Parham, leadership came from the Parish Clerk and the generally accepted goal was to produce a book as a celebration of the Millennium.  The book positioned the village as it was in the year 2000 in relation to its long, exceptionally rich, historical heritage and its hopes for the future.  Parham’s success came because the village was the agency that selected the project and fuelled it to completion.

Here then are two place-based adventure classrooms for others to develop:

Go to:- Community learning

Go to:- Ecological learning

5 Internet references

Place based learning

Djscovery

Francis Bacon

Probono economics

Adventure learning 1

Experiential learning

Adventure learning 2

Rural resilience

Du Fu: a poet of place

Curiator

Community learning

Community and culture

Scenic amenity value

Life satisfaction

Amenity migration

Science of scenery

Ancestry in perspective

INFED 1

INFED 2

Skomer an island for playful learning