Educational Action Research, Volume 11, Number 2, 2003
Living at the Border: between multiculturality, complexity and action research MICHELA MAYER INVALSI – Istituto Nazionale per la Valutazione del Sistema dell’Istruzione, Frascati (Rome), Italy
ABSTRACT The author looks into the phases of her personal experience in order to present the difficulties as well as the richness of ‘living at the border’ and of building bridges between different worlds. The prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture, above all in the world of research, obliges those who do not belong to this culture to undergo a form of tension between adaptation to language rules and ways of thinking that are foreign to them, and the need to maintain cultural and personal differences while trying to communicate. The experience Downloaded At: 01:30 11 December 2009
of ‘contagion’ between ideas and ways of representing the world, that was seen within the Environment and School Initiatives Project (ENSI) project and that the author had the opportunity to share with John Elliott, shows the possibilities offered by these encounters. Issues such as those of the complexity and quality of learning have interweaved with those of action research and evaluation, and have crossed and enriched the values and cultures of which we were implicitly and explicitly the bearers. In the final section the author makes an attempt to illustrate the risks of today’s globalisation and the tendency to eliminate borders, viewed as obstacles to individual freedom, for a kind of equalisation which, by eliminating the differences, also eliminates the possibility of development and of creativity.
If we look carefully, life always ends up being a question of borders. It does not matter whether they are the borders of the sea, of the heart, of the mind, of the spirit, of knowledge, of cultures, of rocks,… Because it is precisely in borders that living systems weave and negotiate their own entrances and exits from the contexts in which they live. In them they learn to build their own changes of image,
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their own relations, their own adaptations, their more significant interchanges. (Fibla, 2002) Like José Maria Fibla Foix, a Spanish artist and thinker, I also often think of the effort, but also the richness, of living at ‘the borders’ (orillas in Spanish), of being willing to live in an unstable equilibrium at the interfaces between cultures, ways of thinking and ways of life. Moving across borders in a globalised world is something that seems to conjure up the boredom of waiting in airport lounges, which all look the same, rather than the adventure and the passage between different cultures and worlds. And yet this apparent ease of communication, which means that it takes only a few hours to cross entire continents and a few minutes to send email messages, is only a mask that often enables people to take their home with them like a snail, to avoid the experiencing of borders. In my specific case, with a degree in physics, initially being a teacher and then researcher at a research centre of the Ministry [1] and also with a PhD in education, a German surname, Latin American origins and a somewhat approximate knowledge of English, every contact with AngloSaxon and Anglo-American culture has been both a cognitive adventure and an emotional stress. My encounter with John Elliott was a positive example of this adventure, of the fact that, in the end, it was all worth it. It was by no means easy – in fact, it was very hard at the start. An initial problem with my relations with the Anglo-Saxon world, and with John, was language. A language is a way of articulating thought, of representing the world and of constructing meanings. Therefore, the attempt to communicate between people of different languages and cultures – people whose only common feature is their great interest for the project they are carrying on – means firstly that another way to represent the world is possible, to then try to overcome the boundaries, to build bridges between the two worlds. The apparent uniformity of language, the widespread use of English, hides the differences in thinking of the world: ‘Nomina nuda tenemus’, as Umberto Eco recalls at the end of his novel, The Name of the Rose, but the names and words we need to communicate have different sounds in different languages, and they interconnect with rules which enable, or do not allow, highlighting the relations and connections. For instance, Kate, in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, does not convey the same images as the corresponding Italian name Caterina (which recalls saints and wisdom), because even proper names involve memories, relations and experiences. Moreover, the word ‘borders’ does not correspond to the Spanish term orillas, which also means a river bank and sea or lake shore. Approaching another culture, and thus accepting the possibility of expressing oneself in another language (albeit with the precious help of friends like Frank Amodeo, who translated this contribution), is like venturing into unknown territory; and trying to understand one another and
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to communicate really requires – as in Bruner’s metaphor, taken up by Bridget Somekh (1994) – learning to inhabit one another’s castle, if not the whole world. I believe that, for a long time, I thought I was alone in this effort to live the border region in order to build bridges, but I now realise that it necessarily takes two to do this: you cannot build a bridge if there is nobody on the other side making the same effort to do so, by constructing arches and a pier in order to receive, to listen. A cognitive adventure, then, and also emotional stress because the differences are not just cognitive ones but correspond to different ways of forming relationships, of showing interest, care and appreciation. Time was necessary, for me and I think for John as well, to get to a point of not taking the ‘cultural’ attitudes of the other as a manifestation of male chauvinism (or feminism), of arrogance or aggression, and to appreciate the diversity and uniqueness of the other, and to show this appreciation in an acceptable manner for oneself and for the other.
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Complexity as a View of the World Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which stone supports the whole bridge?’, asks Kublai Kan. ‘The bridge is not held up by any one particular stone’, answers Marco, ‘but by the arch that they all go to form’. Kublai Kan remains silent, deep in thought. He then resumes, ‘Why do you talk of stones when the only thing that matters is the arch?’ Polo replies, ‘Without stones there is no arch’. (translated from: Calvino [1972] Le città invisibili, p. 83) My world, my future plan, was at that time – as now – strictly connected to the issue of complexity and to the relation linking stones to the arch, linking disciplines to a view of the world. This idea of complexity comes directly from a reflection on science – and it was not mediated at the time by any rethinking and translation (again, a move between different worlds) in educational and sociological terms (Phelps & Hase, 2002). In the 1980s there was much debate in Italy on the criticism of ‘normal’ science, imbued with objectivity, neutrality and predictability, which still constitutes the widespread image of science in the world, to try instead to use the tools made available by ‘modern’ (and not postmodern!) science and by philosophical and epistemological thought, in order to establish the constitutive elements of a different image – not just of science, but of the whole world that humankind tries to represent through knowledge (and the words that convey it). The good fortune of being born ‘at the border’ between positivist science and modern science allowed us, and still enables us, to look towards the new and old way of thinking in order to understand how to boost this slow change process as regards points of view.
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The debate extended beyond the small circle of experts (Bocchi & Cerruti, 1985) to reach the world of education (Conserva, 1996) and that of the daily press (L’Unità, 1990), as well as, and especially, the world of the environmentalists, who recognised the need for a radical change in looking at the world. In this debate, complexity was not put forward as a ‘new paradigm’ in the Kuhnian sense, or as a scientific theory to replace another scientific theory now considered obsolete, but constituted the emerging of a new vision of the world and of the possible relationships between humankind and the world. In 1986 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proposed a study on Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI), within the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), and it involved 12 member countries. As national coordinator of the Italian contribution, one of my first concerns was to include the idea of complexity in the study, and how that idea could be put into practice by teachers. In 1989, Laura Conti, ecologist and member of the Italian Parliament – who was present at the Linz conference organised within the OECD’s ENSI project, where I first met John Elliott – told the teachers of the Italian schools taking part in the project: You have the task of enabling pupils to get used to predicting the behaviour of living things: but since each living thing is unique, its behaviour is never predictable with certainty. Predicting the unpredictable is a little difficult, but doing it habitually is even more so, and I don’t know how you can manage it. Yet people need to learn what complexity is, that is a function of diversity, that in its extreme case is the uniqueness of each subject. (Conti, 1989) In Linz, the term ‘complexity’ was also used by John Elliot and Peter Posch, but as a way of conveying difficult and intricate relations or as a synonym of the complicated result of the dominance of ‘technical rationality’ in the modern world (Posch, 1991). In actual fact, as Isabel Stengers writes, ‘complexity is an interesting notion insofar as it assumes, and must render explicit, its difference from the notion of complication’, and thus its otherness with respect to any ‘reductionism’ of complex systems to simple elements. Isabelle, co-author with Prigogine of one of the books often cited as the origin of a ‘theory’ or ‘science’ of complexity (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), goes on to say: The vision of a complex world cannot as such replace another scientific view of the world. The very notion of vision of the world, of a point of view, starting from which any general and unifying discussion can be made, ... must be at the heart of the issue. (Stengers, 1987) Complexity thus corresponds to the emerging of a problem, to a gaining of awareness that springs to our attention for this very development of science, and of the catastrophes following the ‘reductionist extension’ of the results
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obtained with simple models to complex realities such as the environment. All our daily life phenomena, the real ones and not those reproduced in a laboratory, are intrinsically unpredictable, chaotic and disordered. For the Italian teachers, discussions on complexity did not only consider the ‘Gaia thinking’ put forward by Lovelock and Margulis, but also tried to go further by exploring the relations between holistic knowledge and disciplinary knowledge, between metaphorical understanding and the understanding of organisational relations and levels, not in abstract terms, but in the practising of concrete teaching/learning methods in line with this view of the world. Education sciences and environmental sciences thus share elements needing to be processed in the light of a culture of complexity: the unpredictability of results (such as those of learning that is not repetitive and behaviourist); the need for a global approach to problems without any pretence to isolate the variables; the difficulty of distinguishing the system observed by the observer and thus the need to always take their relations into account; the attention to ‘emergencies’, to the ordered and unpredictable structures that can arise within the apparently disordered and chaotic situations; the ‘sensitivity’ towards values that guide theories and practices (Mayer, 1994). In environmental education, turning to a culture of complexity at that time meant the attention to undue generalisations and simplifications; an attention to the ‘structure which connects’ (Bateson, 1979), to relations and processes and not just to the final states – complexity above all as the attention to the relation between observer and the observed, between those who know and the system that must be grasped; complexity for asking oneself about the ‘relevance’ of questions rather than about the correctness of results, and to highlight limits and problems more than proposing solutions; thus, the complexity not so much, or not only, of an external reality that we cannot manage to simplify, but of the modalities of knowledge with which we build our representations of the world.
Action Research as a Way to Approach Complexity If in Linz we tried, together with the Italian schools, to put forward – to the other ‘worlds’, the other countries taking part in the project – this notion of complexity as a way to construct relevant knowledge, although aware of its limits with respect to environmental problems, the encounter with Peter Posch and John Elliott opened up the doors of action research for us and of its use for curriculum change that draws its drive from within the school and not from outside authorities. Given my teacher-researcher background, I had never harboured doubts on the practitioner’s ability to generate knowledge of the kind that can keep pace with academic knowledge, but John and Peter offered me the theory, and practical experience, to support a cyclical process of reflection on one’s own knowledge, of action and careful
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The environmental crisis ... is not an ecological catastrophe caused by natural evolution, but is created by the thought with which we have built and destroyed our world. ... it leads us to think of being ... to open new roads to knowledge in the direction of the reconstruction and re-appropriation of the world. A second fundamental step was the reflection on the connections between the culture of complexity and educational constructivism. If knowledge can only be constructed, then the teacher’s role must be that of creating significant contexts and to pose ‘legitimate questions’ – i.e. questions which do not have readily known answers (von Foerster, 1971), within which students can ‘actively create their meanings’ (Elliott, 1991a), and where ‘local knowledge’ is produced. To the question, does a different educational context allow us to construct a different kind of knowledge? the group answered by linking complexity to constructivism: knowing involves a project on reality, even implicit, on the part of the knower. This project is always, often unconsciously, one of modifying reality, which at the same time acts on the person, interrelates with him and changes him. Being aware of the limits of the observer and his interdependence with the subject observed, not only changes the manner but also the contents of knowledge. (Losito & Mayer, 1995) The research group’s reflections were rooted in practice and tried to combine concrete action, and the indications emerging from practice, with theory. Exploring new contexts, starting to jointly construct with students not only the answers but also the questions which needed to be answered, highlighted how every knowledge process depended on its guiding values and on the points of view that everyone chose in order to tell his/her own ‘story’; it also depended on how a culture of complexity should include the need for ties and boundaries, and the recognition not only of the
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uncertainty and the intrinsic unpredictability of most of the phenomena, but also of the value of ignorance as a contribution to action and to decision-making: ignorance is usable, useful and essential in order to know ourselves and our relationship with our environment. Being aware of our ignorance may be the start of a new wisdom with respect to our place in the contemporary world. (Ravetz,1992) This way of perceiving complexity in the educational relation and particularly in environmental education was closely connected to the other core research topic: the development of dynamic qualities. The link with the culture of complexity allowed us to analyse the dynamic qualities – necessary for a new way to think the world and to interact with it – in order to grasp the ones relative to acting in uncertainty, to facing risk and unpredictability in concrete situations while maintaining control. Uncertainty, awareness of our ignorance, allows us to be flexible and to listen to and appreciate other people’s opinions, to abandon known paths and seek new ones:
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the revaluation of mistakes, doubts and conflicts as no longer negative but constructive elements is the concrete result of our work. (Teachers from the Technical Institute of Iglesias, Sardinia, quoted in Losito & Mayer, 1995). In this collective reflection, involving both teachers and students, action research was the means by which the group could implement modes of research, action, and reflection on the action that were in line with the issue being explored: I like action research very much ... I also find it useful in everyday programming, in which open questions or legitimate research questions must find ample space ... In this case, action research is important as critical reflection on one’s work via a diary and students interviews. (Teacher from the Middle School of Moena, Trentino, quoted in Losito & Mayer, 1995) For the Italian teachers the use of action research methodologies was not only a possibility to grow ‘in their self awareness or in terms of their professional skills and dispositions’ (Nofke, 1994, p. 16) but an opportunity for a conscious production of ‘new’ knowledge about how to introduce complexity issues in their everyday practice (Mayer, 1997). Their action research was a true collaborative one: in the process of trying to construct theories which give meaning to their own practice, and practices which involve them in exploring theories beyond their own, they created a wider context and raised wider shared issues than those that could have been constructed individually. Through action research, the teachers identified themselves as mediators, builders of the ‘inter-est’ (from Latin, ‘to be in between’), between ‘expert’ knowledge, often of an analytical and
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disciplinary nature, and a holistic knowledge, that is practical and also theoretical, of which students and ordinary citizens are the bearers. The close connection between action research and knowledge construction suitable for a complex approach to education and to the environment was not solely limited in that phase of the ENSI project to the Italian group but also spread to other countries, teachers and researchers, also through a conference organised in Perugia in 1992. It influenced John as well, and in one of his contributions to the final report of the second phase of the ENSI project, entitled ‘Environmental education as an education for complexity’, he acknowledged that the ideas on complexity discussed in Perugia had also influenced other countries (particularly Sweden), above all as regards the close relationship between values and representations of the phenomena ‘because these representations or images are continuously shaped and reshaped by human judgements of what is significant for human action in particular historic and social conditions’ (Elliott, 1995). The arch holding up the bridge between our two cultures was built on the awareness that, albeit in the differences of cultural contexts and personal experiences, we had some fundamental values in common: a conception of education and of the teaching–learning processes based on the respect for diversity, on the development of a critical spirit, on the responsibility for constructing ‘usable knowledge in the local community’, careful of every risk of ‘indoctrination’. Educating for environmental complexity involves a recognition of the diversity of value positions which shape human conduct in the environment and give rise to controversial issues. (Elliott, 1995) The difficulty the teacher finds when working with environmental education, as with any other kind of ‘education’ which refers to values, is that of ‘believing in what you do while at the same time giving opportunity for other beliefs’. Open debate of values and conflicts is not just a way to bringing them to light, it is also a way of practising a fundamental value: the respect for differences. (Mayer, 1995) The respect for differences, careful consideration of different points of view, is another bridge linking the culture of complexity to action research. Triangulation, a cross-referencing of points of view, data and interpretations, is one of the strengths of each. If, in fact, ‘We can never identify how things are, especially in matters of people and their environment, without already interpreting what we find, implicitly preparing for decisions or making value judgements’ (Stengers, 1992), the problem is not that of seeking an objective knowledge which is detached from contexts, but, rather, that of comparing subjective knowledge linked to contexts and guided by values in order to take on the responsibility to support it and to support the resulting decisions:
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bias is a condition of situational understanding because all interpretation is shaped by a practical culture, i.e. a system of value and belief which is conditioned by practical concerns ... Situational understanding is improved not by eliminating bias but by modifying it. (Elliott, 1993)
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Values and Quality in Education Complexity and action research provide the necessary conceptual tools for creating conditions and contexts in which to test beliefs on the capability of the education system to build democratic and responsible societies. Action research encourages practitioners to reflect on their activities and thus asks them to reflect on their own beliefs with regard to the school’s role and to what goes to make up the ‘quality’ of the educational process. That is why reflections on action research in the ENSI project interweaved with and supplemented the reflections on evaluation and on quality, and particularly on what kind of evaluation could be consistent with the principles – and values – that the ENSI project was establishing for environmental education. Even before a meeting organised by CARE – the Centre for Applied Research in Education – for the ENSI project and totally dedicated to evaluation (OECD, 1994), we in Italy had tried to deal with the theme through a study (Mayer, 1991) which aimed to combine the methods of action research – case studies, the presence of facilitators, a ‘critical’ group of practitioners – with evaluation research methods. The idea was that of defining quality indicators for environmental education in order to replace the idea of ‘performance indicators’ characterising the international scene at that time – all this in order to put forward an evaluation of quality based on teachers’ reflective capacities and on the importance of differences between contexts rather than an evaluation inspired by an outside need for control and based on ‘standards’ which, as such, cannot account for the differences and values borne by the different contexts. As Saville Kushner pointed out (1993), the tension between quality and control can be solved by searching for ‘quality as an alternative to control’. Any description of educational processes cannot but be of an interpretative nature, and thus conditioned and guided by values – which define criteria – and indicators, which allow us to judge educational contexts and the methodologies we are using as appropriate and effective. The process put forward and carried out in Italy in 1990 with a group of teachers active in environmental education (nearly all of them later involved in the ENSI project) was that of analysing the values we felt guided our idea of environmental education, to then turn these values into a set of quality ‘indicators’. The very word ‘indicators’ was an ambiguous term that needed to be researched. If, in a positivist culture, indicators are essentially numerical – often statistical – indicators, an indirect index of the existence of relations
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Michela Mayer assumed to be random, then in a culture of complexity, the words ‘indicators’ and ‘indexes’ recalled, for us Italians, the proposal made by the historian Carlo Ginzburg (1986) of a ‘circumstantial paradigm’ (paradigma indiziario, in Italian) as opposed to the ‘Galilean paradigm’ of hard sciences. In a circumstantial paradigm what matters is the differences and not the similarities: small differences, small signs and clues, allow the researcher to reconstruct the case (Mayer, 1993). The indicators of quality, in our definition of indicators, seemed to us to allow a method of analysis and evaluation of environmental education projects that was ‘isomorphic’ to the complexity and variability of schools’ initiatives and consistent with the approach to environmental education proposed by the ENSI project. In our proposal (Ammassari & Palleschi, 1991), the indicators explicitly referred to a model based on values – like an identity card that helped us to recognise the criteria we considered fundamental for a quality environmental education. These indicators were organised into a system and were composite – i.e. made up of other indicators and indexes – and they were, above all, defined and articulated using the strategies of reflection on action, participation and negotiation proposed both by action research and by ‘democratic evaluation’ (Elliott, 1991b). This experience and research would not have been the same without the fundamental contribution deriving from exchanges with John Elliott and from the reflections that CARE was making in those years. The idea for quality indicators, or rather quality criteria, that would then lead to those indicators and indexes which, in all contexts, are deemed pertinent and significant, still continues to be vital today in environmental education, albeit differently arranged in the various countries, proceeding by trial and error in the attempt to construct strategies and practices to oppose the spreading of a kind of evaluation that only considers ‘outputs’, in the illusion of obtaining information on the validity of processes. Evaluation, which still represents a challenge for environmental education, rejects the idea of control and replaces it with that of confrontation within a community of practitioners, who share a common view of the ‘quality of education processes’ and propose to use this idea of quality to improve their own work and professionalism. The indicators can be used by the practitioners themselves – be they teachers or other people operating in the field of environmental education – as instruments for constructing projects and actions – like a compass orienting change – and also as a means for interpreting projects carried out in order to highlight the emerging qualities. They can even serve as a self-evaluation instrument, of both a formative and summative kind, and for democratic evaluation (Mayer, 2000). It is thus an evaluation geared to the enhancement and support of practitioners’ professionalism, while the current forms of evaluation and auditing create:
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a counterproductive situation in which practitioners, such as teachers, lose motivation and interest in their work, go through the motion of compliance, and avoid taking reasonable and necessary risks for fear of being wrong (playing it safe). (Elliott, 2002) As the ENSI project and the whole environmental education process highlighted, no far-reaching innovation or change is possible without, at least temporarily, being willing to move in uncertainty. As Stenhouse (1975) said, ‘As innovators, teachers are asked to take on, initially at least, the burden of incompetence’. To think that evaluation can be restricted to just a quality check on results means persisting with an implicit image of school as a system of ‘reproduction’ and ‘transmission’ of behaviours, values and information. The research we are currently carrying on in Italy on the ‘Quality of Environmental Education Centres’ and, at international level through the ENSI network, on the ‘Quality Criteria for Ecoschools’ accepts the challenge of an evaluation that is both geared to quality enhancement and to quality assurance (Elliott, 1998). All this is in order to guarantee space for research and risk while at the same time guaranteeing the practitioners-researchers on the consistency of the path they are trying to follow and the basic values guiding them, as well as on the acceptability of this path on the part of the institutions called upon to take the relative decisions. In this process, a significant role is played by the facilitator, the ‘external evaluator’, who views their own role as that of a mediator and negotiator between the practitioners’ needs, the political institutions’ needs and the value systems around which they seek to obtain a preliminary consensus. It is thus not a matter of eliminating the differences in order to build just one way of thinking, but of recognising the fact that, without any agreement on certain fundamental principles or values, it is difficult to then set up any meaningful mediations or negotiations (Magyar & Mayer, 1998). Cooperation and useful confrontation should be created not so much with respect to problem-solving, but to problem-construction: one of the conditions for constructive cooperation is that there be: a shared representation of problems, i.e. a common representation of the things that need to be solved. It is not enough to share the solutions to certain problems. The problems themselves need to be perceived in the same way by all those involved. This, too, most of the time, is the result of work to be carried out and not a lucky starting condition ... the time-saving in quickly defining solutions is actually something that has its drawbacks later when a difficult agreement must be found on the way to implement those solutions ... the world is full of solutions seeking a problem. (Donegà, 1998) In this process of cooperation and sharing, the external evaluator and the ‘second order action researcher’, using John Elliott’s terminology, end up by coinciding and offering an example of the importance of living on the
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The Challenge of Globalisation: being citizens in a society of uncertainty and risk Borders – las orillas – in a culture of complexity are not barriers to be overcome, but the necessary tools for the development of life, society and thought. Borders enable us to build identities and to activate selforganisation processes; borders allow visits and exchanges; constraints and rules allow us to seek and find creative solutions. Borders and constraints can, at times, be changed, but a life without any borders, any walls, any constraints, is not possible. Recognising our dependence on borders and constraints, to then build our creativity and our freedom upon this dependence, is – in my view – the new challenge that the twenty-first century presents to the world of education. The crisis that education systems are facing all over the world is partly connected to the crisis under way in this society, and we must acknowledge the fact that while it is increasingly necessary to have a change of values that guide this society and its education systems, this change is increasingly less perceived and accepted. The world of an expanding economy, of a secure job for life, of scientific and technological solutions for all problems and of undisputed moral superiorities is over for good, even though still only a few people are fully aware of it. From the world of security and predictability, promoted at the end of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century has instead led us to a world characterised by uncertainty, complexity, the interdependence between all components of a system whose ultimate limit is the whole planet. And this interdependence between the components of the system is not just spatial but temporal: we owe the concept of a ‘risk society’ to Beck (1986); indeed, of a global society of risk, as brought by an industrial modernisation forced to deal with the uncertainties it itself has generated. Risk, and the risk perceived and recognised as such, changes the relationship between past, present and future: ‘the past loses its power to determine the present and its place ... is taken by the future, or something non-existent, something created and fictional’ (Beck, 1999). As Giddens (1990) says, one of the profound changes between tradition and modernity is that the former looks to the past, where it finds elements to justify the present and to prepare the future, while with modernity it is the future – the ideas of future – that influence the present and change not only the present but our interpretation of the past. A realistic utopia and a shared representation of the future are the instruments to build not just the future but also the present. If modernity is characterised by its ‘reflexivity’, it is through the spreading of possible
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future scenarios, of new constraints and new borders, that today’s society can be influenced. Imagining the future was one of the ‘actions’ the teachers researched within the realm of environmental education, in Sweden as well as in Italy. Imagining the future opens the door to values and fears, to uncertainty and the capabilities needed for not being overwhelmed by it. The class that comes together as a discourse community may constitute a ‘forum for negotiating and renegotiating meaning’ (Bruner, 1988), may offer a space and the occasion for building new perspectives of the world, guiding ideas (Banathy, 1989) or realistic utopias (Giddens) to steer action, where we can experience the shift from recognitive thought, for conservation, to an evolutionary thought (Banathy, 1989) of a flexible and participated designing of ways in order to ‘wisely inhabit’ the planet. In this era of globalisation, the borders or frontiers seem to have moved and we must ask ourselves in what direction and why. Above all, we are beginning to erase the borders between meanings, thus confusing the relationship linking them to words and values they should represent: we are getting accustomed to terms such as ‘virtual reality’, ‘total quality’ or ‘sustainable development’. All these are oxymorons, contradictory terms stressing and denying the contradictions of our times, but that also try to affirm a logic, a value system – the competitive and homogenising one of the market – by disguising it under terms which recall other values and other logics. Consider the term ‘globalisation’, which is by now used as a synonym for a market extending all over the world, while up until a few years ago it was used to refer to an environmentalist and participative representation of the world. Thinking globally and acting locally was, and still is, one of the principles on which environmental education is based, but it is the ‘no global’ movement that actually represents its guiding values in practice and certainly not the globalised multinational company McDonalds. Another term which, as we have seen, has changed meaning is ‘quality’: instead of recalling to mind what makes life worth living – the environment, school, life itself – there is instead an idea of ‘quality’ that hides the lightness of quality under the weight of figures and procedures. Education for ‘sustainable development’, which has by now replaced environmental education – at least for politicians and decision-makers – is another contradictory term put forward and used also to legitimise a drive for economic development that the environmental crisis pointed to as unsustainable. Therefore, the words we use every day in education and in environmental education have changed in meaning over the last 10 years – often without us even realising it. The problem is not the change of meaning: cultural evolution as well as biological evolution cannot be halted, and words gain or lose meanings according to the objects and concrete experiences they are actually used for. The problem is of not being aware of
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Michela Mayer this and to carry on as if practices and representations of the world had not changed along with meanings. The Australian Aborigines believe their ancestors created the world through words and songs, and even the religions of the Western world place the ‘word’ at the origin of creation. We should take care, then, not to lose, along with the meaning of words, the world which we dreamt of creating also by means of the words themselves. In an increasingly homogenised planet we are not just losing our biodiversity but our cultural diversity: borders are increasingly hazy and we increasingly use English words in the illusion that this helps to overcome boundaries while it only serves to impoverish not just language but the reality it represents and on which it is based. Augé talks of ‘non-places’, of spaces ‘in which he who crosses them cannot read anything of his own identity (of his relationship with himself) or of his relations with others’ (1997), and offers up, as examples of these ‘non-places’, Disneyland, shopping centres and holiday resorts; all the places where we find what we expect, where standardisation is even seen as an ‘indicator of quality’, in a manner alienated from the contexts and from the ‘real cultures’ in which these complexes are built. In these kinds of ‘non-places’, the pleasures to be gained are those of actually experiencing what the brochures and advertising had promised, and not those of discovering frontiers and of living at the border. Even from a purely cultural standpoint, we are not experiencing the overcoming of differences but the advancement of ‘noncultures’ – all those human constructions not rooted in differences but in homogenisation (Mayer, 2002). If information is ‘a difference that produces a difference’ (Bateson, 1979), the information generated by non-cultures is a (superficial) difference that produces a (considerable) homogenisation. Noncultures are represented by advertising, television formats, music videos, shows and books of mass consumption, where there is no production of knowledge, intuitions, reflections, but a recognition and recycling of what is already known and consumed. In this substitution of real cultures with non-cultures, the danger is that the lack of roots, of a history and reflection, makes them appear, and be accepted, as ‘limitless’, ready to supply and guarantee new certainties and new horizons. In a free-market society, all limits seem to be placed ‘offlimits’ and freedom is mainly seen as a ‘negative’ sort, as a lack of restrictions and not as the actual possibility to act and intervene in society (Bauman, 1999). The apparent contradiction of this very society, between a utopian lack of limitations and the delegating of decision-making (to the market, politicians, experts and so on), leads to increasing anxiety and individual suffering due not only to uncertainty but also to the lack of existential security and the fear for one’s own safety. Instead of learning to come to terms with uncertainty and to approach a rational – albeit not a ‘secure’ – way of evaluating choices and to take on responsibility, people prefer to build their own security ‘against’ someone or something – in an attempt to
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find someone to blame for what is happening to us (so much so that in the globalisation era there is the increasing difficulty to reconstruct processes and to identify causes), to find a scapegoat, be they immigrants or anyone who is different from us, and to launch public safety campaigns. Uncertainty thus becomes a synonym for insecurity, and the collective imagery no longer links terms like flexibility or redundancy to increasing opportunities or the necessary ways to ‘guide nature by allowing oneself to be led’ (Morin, 1999), but to precariousness and ‘disposable jobs’. The notion of uncertainty must thus be accompanied by a reflection on the notion of democracy, and a democratic society should be a ‘place of critical reflection’, a society where ‘no problem is solved in advance’, where ‘uncertainty does not cease once a solution is adopted’ (Bauman, 1999), and in which not only is the future uncertain, but also the past, because it is open to reanalysis and can be interpreted in ever-different ways. Living at the border, dealing with controversial issues and acting in uncertainty are the common features of educational processes that, with the help of people like John Elliott, I have tried to outline in order to find, together with the teachers involved, new skills, new ways of thinking and of acting. It is a matter of building flexibility of thought, critical capacity, resistance to frustrations, but also something more: a ‘negative capability’ [2], a capability of being in uncertainty, of accepting moments of indeterminacy and of grasping the potential of understanding and of actions implicit in these moments, of accepting ‘half-knowledge’, of letting events follow their course without the presumption of being able to determine the course of the point of arrival. This is no renouncing of the will to act, but an opportunity to listen and understand, to build action plans and systems suitable for the context and the level of understanding reached. It is the capability of not accepting things for their plain and obvious significance, but to suspend our judgement – or our haste for a solution – in order to build new meanings. If the present is a result of our past, nothing can be done to change it; but if the present is the moment in which we build the future, then everyone has the responsibility of contributing to building the future they want. Living at the border also means recognising our possibilities of building bridges between past and future, of hybridising concepts and influencing cultures while maintaining our identity and, at the same time, developing and changing ourselves a little every day. To learn to do so, we need to explore new roads without being afraid of making mistakes, but being prepared to acknowledge and make use of them in order to go on. Action research is the tool we can use and can also offer students and teachers in order to deal with this difficult task. We will not be the only ones to build the future – nor will we be able to predict or control it with any certainty – but we shall be among the ones to do so:
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Michela Mayer a good society ... should make its members free: not only free in a negative sense, i.e. not obliged to do what they don’t want to do, but free in a positive sense, i.e. to be able to use one’s freedom to do things ... capable of influencing one’s conditions of life, of elaborating the meaning of the ‘common good’ and of making the society’s institutions conform to that meaning. (Baumann, 1999)
Correspondence Michela Mayer, INVALSI, Villa Falconieri, Via Borromini 5, I-00044 Frascati (Rm), Italy (mmayer@invalsi.it).
Notes [1] The Centro Europeo dell’Educazione (CEDE), with tasks of research and innovation, has recently been turned into the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System – INVALSI. [2] ‘Negative capability’ has been defined by Lanzara (1997) as a way of being and acting in a different manner than the one contemplated by the ‘positive incapability’ of acting in conditions not clearly defined that accompanies excessive, and specialised, competence.
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