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Stacey Huget
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Vancouver Learning City - A Few Reflections

Upon reflection, and at the risk of lending credence to the “misery loves company” notion, I have to admit it was reassuring to learn that many of the most daunting challenges faced by the Vancouver Learning City are ones being grappled with elsewhere.  True, there were no “silver bullets” fired in our exchange, but I think we all emerged somewhat better armed for battle.  And therein lies the crux:  Why does it feel like such a fight to create sustainable learning communities?  Why should promoting lifelong learning to advance people’s wellbeing and quality of life be such an uphill grind? 


Peter Kearns and others have teased out a number of themes from our exchange.  As Peter aptly remarks, it is a seeming paradox in that the case for lifelong learning has never been greater in the environment confronting cities but the high tide of learning city development appears to have receded.  Our blogs suggest the worst features of this recession include scarce, readily-dismantled funding; half-baked government support and policy integration; and a kind of clock-ticking pressure to beat our “best before date” by delivering impossibly tangible outcomes in an impossibly curtailed timeframe. 


One of the greatest assets of lifelong learning is its integral role in virtually everything that advances our communities. Unfortunately, this centrality is complex and this complexity may well be our greatest liability.  As Norman Longworth points out, the complex interaction and holism between economic and social, human, intellectual, community and cultural capital tends to be forgotten or ignored.  He suggests it is too difficult to fathom out and tap into.  Reluctantly, I have to agree with him.  Many of us were encouraged by the work of the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) and its Composite Learning Index (CLI) and by how the CLI performance indicators of a “learning culture” might support actionable, informed policy.  Then we watched as government cut funding, reducing the effort to a “back-burner” sputter.   The reality is that most people and organizations simply “glaze over” at the complexity of the relationships between lifelong learning and other economic, social, cultural, and political issues.


Although we use slightly different, locally-appropriate strategies for doing it, our work requires us to meaningfully position “learning” in relation to other issues shaping our society.  I’ve long thought the economic development “case” for lifelong learning, for example – global competitiveness, labour market management, meaningful employment – might prove compelling for those with the resources to intervene, but this, too, seems to have yielded modest results.  The same, in Canada anyway, can be said of the social and cultural thrusts of our work.  We have yet to capture the imagination, unleash the influence of policy makers and funders/investors around learning as a permanent fulcrum for socio-economic and cultural development. We are still largely operating “cap in hand” – vulnerable to dismissal as a flavour of the month, a “cause” jockeying for attention among others.


What accounts for this absence of full “capture”?  We and our colleagues and partners share an energetic passion for lifelong learning – a deeply intuitive and empirically-informed conviction around its ability to advance virtually every aspect of our individual, social, cultural, and economic well being.  Yet, in Canada and perhaps elsewhere, we’ve aroused a bland, conditional, tenuous interest and commitment among those in a position of influence.   What are we missing?


Bruce Wilson makes a good point that maybe it’s what we’re saying and how we’re saying it.  He suggests that maybe it’s the language of learning that gets in the way, that maybe we need to focus more on how we connect with ordinary people on the ground.   I agree with him.  Perhaps, ultimately, that’s the chorus we’ve not yet organized: the voices of the public, the hum of the electorate.


Change requires a critical mass, a groundswell of urging.  On a global scale, public outcry over environmental issues has begun to change the lens through which governments and industry make decisions about resources and technology.  Nationally and internationally, one can find evidence that lenses are similarly beginning to change around issues of poverty, addiction, homelessness, hunger, healthcare – albeit at a glacial pace.  Here in Vancouver, whilst we were engaging in this exchange, a local movement – whipped up to a large extent through the strategic use of online social networking and marketing media – has mobilized itself to quite possibly halt municipal approval of a casino expansion development generally considered until recently to be a foregone conclusion.  Onlookers are gobsmacked by the effects of this elegant, scrappy campaign.  I am wondering what we can learn from it.


Granted, making lifelong learning an urgent matter – a rallying cry around a solution to some imminent threat – is neither appropriate nor possible.  But might we work together, as a global network, to breathe more life into it as a value about which people care and are willing to get noisy?  What might that look like and entail?  How might we collaborate to make better use of social marketing and digital technologies to advance public consciousness about the issue, internationally?  Is this a worthwhile role we might play in the future?


I have no doubt, as evidenced in this exchange, that we’re more than capable of developing creative and collaborative interventions to advance lifelong learning in our communities;  what we haven’t yet done is secure and compel enduring policy and investment commitments to sustain those interventions  over time.  I agree with Bruce Wilson that we need to ask ourselves Who is listening?  Perhaps we need to also ask Who is making the noise?


 


 

Comments

Stacey's blog - Norman's response

by Norman Longworth - Mar 16 2011 - 15:01

Don't we all recognise Stacey's call for relevance in learning! I've been part of many initiatives that try to get the urgency of learning through to administrators, politicians and ordinary people. The Dublin consultation exercise, for example, which claims to have reached more than half the city's population, created youth councils and neighbourhood asssemblies and a blueprint for action. 9 years later it is a forgotten opportunity and little has happened to create the learning city Dublin was destined to become. In 1999 I was part of the Glasgow Learning City launch where the great and the good of the city came together to celebrate the beginning of a new 'Learning Glasgow'. There was money, there was hope, there was excitement. 12 years later the dreams have faded - the magnitude of the task so much more than dreams could deliver. Which is not to say that nothing happened - indeed much did, for example the 'Real' project which established more than a hundred learning centres in the city. But we always seem to underestimate the strength of political opportunism, the siren call of the trivial mass media and the deep-seated resistance to change. The undeclared opposition is inertia, information overload and a reluctance to face a changing future 

In the LILARA project, we created persuasive tools that measured the lifelong learning needs of city administrators  - first making the case for a learning region and then collecting learning needs in 12 different domains. Our rationale was the same as in Total Quality Management ie that nothing gets done unless everyone is informed and has a personal stake in getting it done. Total response out of 4500 city administrators was 215, despite. or perhaps because of, a letter from the CEO that this was an important issue for the city. 

So where do we go from here? Fox news, tabloid newspapers, advertisers, dictators, the Taliban are enthusiastic advocates of learning - brain-stem reactionary learning that sells their products, their message, their religion, their version of democracy. They would not appreciate the sort of high-order cognitive learning that prepares people for a complex future - decision-making, problem-solving, thinking skills, critical judgement and so on. Lifelong learning? learning cities? Not likely, squire - that produces too many chiefs and too few indians. And they are the ones in real touch with the vast majority of the population in every country.They have the power, the influence and the money. In Stacey's words they are making the noise. And where the noise is, politicians follow. Where they try to lead, as Clinton and Obama tried to do early in their tenures, they meet a wall of well-financed, vociferous opposition.  

So what is the counter to that? Where is the lifelong learning foghorn? Is it in the use of the social media - facebook, twitter, forums, the web? Is it in local community empowerment as in Espoo, Finland? Is it in big programmes like the European Commission's Framework, that try to push back the frontiers of knowledge and learning activity? Is it in the development of widely available powerful learning tools and materials like stakeholder audits and the LILLIPUT project modules that will break through learning resistance and offer new insights? Is it in the creation of guided joint international discussion forums such as PIE, Iearn and seniornet that exchange ideas, experiences, expertise and knowledge between schools, universities, local authorities, adult learners, community organisations separately or jointly? Is it in judicious lobbying of key people in national, local and regional government? Is it in the development of expertise networks like PENR3L that can gather, exchange and broadcast information within their own regions.

These and many more initiatives already exist and are nibbling away at the bastions of inertia. The EUROlocal project is identifying many of them and will make them available by the middle of this year. Perhaps we are too impatient, looking for instant results in a world that changes too slowly for us. I wrote in 1998 that no city or region, not even the most advanced and convinced advocate example of learning city development, is more than 10% of the way to a true learning city - this is a 50 year process for most. I haven't changed my mind. Most Cities and Regions will respond to challenges when it becomes obvious that they must. The ones which will gain the most are those with the imagination to anticipate difficulty before it arises. This is perhaps where PIE comes in - the discussions we are having can alert us not only to challenges but to opportunities as well. I foresee an extension of PIE not far into the future when we can act, as well as discuss, together in joint learning city/region development projects. 

In 2004 I managed a project called PALLACE. It linked Stakeholders - schoolchildren, politicians, adult educators, cutural services in 6 Learning Regions in 4 continents - Australasia, Asia, North America and Europe. Despite being grossly underfunded, it achieved a number of objectives between some of the partners. It jointly developed and tested an adult education audit in New Zealand and France. It linked schoolchildren in Finland with those in South Australia in a project to define the school's place in the community - and so on. It set the guidelines for productive properly-funded international projects that would link whole communities and cities. The results of PALLACE are gathering dust in the basement of a Brussels building, but the ideas remain, and will be signalled in EUROlocal. Time to resurrect and build upon them?    

Norman's response

by Peter Kearns - Mar 19 2011 - 00:35

Many thanks Norman for your excellent contribution. I agree that we are too impatient and need to think more about sustainability of initiatives in long term strategic ways. The experience of Sweden, for example, suggests that it takes considerable time t build up a learning culture.; Your 50 years is about right. So what are the intermediate steps. EUROlocal is certainly useful, and I too would like to see something like PALLACE Mark 2. I wonder if PIE can head in that direction so that PIE becomes a vehicle for action, and not only dialogue (a necessary first step). Perhaps we can kick these ideas around bearing in mind the rapid growth of urbanisation around the world, especially in Asia and Africa.

moving on to?

by Norman Longworth - Apr 7 2011 - 09:56

I'm wondering whether, when, how it would be possible to move on into an action phase. Perhaps not yet but it may be useful to know what form it might take when the time is ripe. There are several tools and learning materials to enhance understanding among individuals, groups, stakeholder organisations and national and local authorities about learning region characteristics and the role they can play in pushing it forward. LILARA learning needs, LILLIPUT materials, Stakeholder Audits, Personal Learning Audits, Computer Software etc. - it all exists and is free of charge world-wide. It seems to me that the funding for large international projects that can exploit these resources and create new ones is not readily available unless we can persuade global funding organisations that this is a priority and is sustainable. Linking cities and regions internationally in a more active way - school to school, university to university, local authority to local authority, museum to museum, library to library, person to person, developed with developing etc - is so obviously a 'good thing' and is already widely done on a piecemeal basis. What we are trying to do is to provide a sustainable and profitable framework - the learning city - within which all these things can take root in a more methodical and systematic way. It should be attractive to global funding organisations - philanthropic, social or economic - but we haven't made the breakthrough yet. Does anyone have an idea where these organisations can be found and how our message can be heard in the cacophone of competing priorities?

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