Fostering ecological transformative learning in regional Australia
Rural and regional Australian communities face significant problems as timber mills close, water rationing and water trading become critical, carbon trading and mining pose threats to future farming viability - and ultimately to food production on which urban populations depend. It is clear that such situations create the need for holistic community-wide educational solutions in which different forms of knowledge and cultural values emerge at local levels.
Many communities have experienced years of superficial attempts at social and economic change, with most interventions only extending the problem. Some communities and towns now face serious dilemmas, calling for major perspective transformations and new actions that will bring about innovation and change at a deep level if they are to survive at all.
The project will examine the role ecological transformative learning is playing in innovation and rural resurgence and explores a new role for UNE as a leader in the field.
Drawing on experiential adult education theory and recent workplace learning research, ecological transformative learning approaches problems from a “bottom up” rather than “top down” orientation. The dilemmas and perspective transformations lead to transformative action learning, as communities try to rediscover themselves and find new realities. While it will be important to learn from and with each community, it seems highly likely that many of these situations will re-examine the values shared between rural and urban communities and how they teach each other about what is realistic for the future.
This project aims to discover examples of transformative learning that encompass new innovative actions that can inform both university extension (also called continuing education) and other communities facing similar dilemmas. The research asks:
- Where is transformative learning taking place in rural and urban communities, and how do they impact on each other?
- What can be learned by linking different university-based discipline-specific knowledge bases to each other in the search for new solutions?
- What is the transformative learning that is taking place?
- What continuing education model can UNE and other educational institutions provide to support and foster such transformative learning, both in the community and within the university?
The key objective of this project is to discover the processes that can really lead change at an ecological level of community transformation.
Through workshops in 4 selected communities researchers will encourage transformative action learning and related methods such as design thinking and improvement learning. They will seek to include university staff from other disciplines in the transformative learning process. The researchers will then analyse the experience and publish a transformative learning resource tool for urban/regional community use on the basis of what is discovered.
The intended outcomes of the project are:
- To begin discovering new ways in which communities adapt to ecologically grounded values and practices to emerge as part of a reforming Australian culture, which values rural communities as healthy, innovative places.
- For the university to discover new ways of being a contributing stakeholder in community change, through value and perspective transformation in ways that lead to greater ecological sustainability and social justice.
- To complete a minimum of four case studies where community level transformative action learning is taking place.
- To identify the processes by which community ecological transformative learning can interact with university knowledge systems and resources as a new form of holistic educational extension, and
- To identify a further twenty sites to which new forms of university extension (as transformative and innovation centred processes) can be applied.
- To publish a transformative learning resource tool, and training improvements for community adult educators.
For more information please contact Associate Professor Bob Boughton: bob.boughton@une.edu.au