PROGRESS THROUGH REVOLUTIONS

AUTHOR

Stu Meese (PGDip FRGS LPIOL)

Stu is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Worcester and an Assistant Educational Visits Advisor for Entrust. He has 30 years of experience in the sector and freelances across the south. He chairs the IOL’s Freelance Cooperative and runs a micro–Community Interest Company closer to home. He has been an AHOEC member for over a decade and is the former chair of its Central Region.

As a member of The Association of Heads of Outdoor Centres, The Outdoor Education Advisory Panel and the Institute for Outdoor Learning (and a few others), I go to quite a few meetings. I see the same people, and we often talk about the same issues facing the sector. The opportunity has now been building for a few years to bring all those voices together to make a difference, to unite and work collaboratively. Yes, there are some differences in approaches, but at the heart of it is the same drive and desire to get people outdoors. Here are my thoughts on the proposed merger and formation of the Outdoor Learning Assocation.

Sixty years ago, Thomas Kuhn put forward a Philosophy of science that transformed how we look at scientific development. He claimed science didn’t just move gradually, inexorably towards the truth and instead gave us an episodic account of how science works. We hold onto a set of core beliefs – a framework, a paradigm - that moves us further towards the truth if explored and data collected well. A paradigm is our shared beliefs, assumptions and knowledge. As we go along, we find anomalies and problems with that core belief, but it provides the day-to-day structures and a way of thinking that allows progress. It throws up questions, but provides ways of finding the answers. But problems accumulate, and anomalies appear that have no answer in our current scientific framework. Our paradigm gets stretched to its limit and becomes problematic. Yet we cling to it; it provides the basis of our learning and discovery, and without it, what do we have to explain the truth? We hear claims of flawed experiments and incoherent data long before we take away the foundations on which they are based. To lose faith in the central paradigm is to stop being a scientist.

Then comes along a new paradigm. A new set of learning and theories that bears no relation to the ones we now hold. Incommensurate with the existing paradigm, it offers more - certainly more questions, more answers, and more science. A crisis ensues with competing players for each paradigm, old and new until the new paradigm is either debunked as inadequate or the scientific community holds it aloft as the proud successor. In the debate, scientists will talk past each other as terms of references and languages of the competing paradigms don’t mesh or allow translation. Those wedded to the old system remain that way, still trying to explain the world in existing terms, and those willing to jump experience a profound shift and must start their science again.

It is at this very ragged frontier that great revolutionary science is done – the significant changes, ground-breaking ideas and movements that define the age and set new precedents for science, moving forward in the quest to explain the world better. We can still examine the old data, but we do so now with not so much a different lens, but with a whole new eye. The new paradigm provides compelling exemplars, and science moves forward, chipping away at the truth with a new set of very different tools.

Kuhn gives examples from Physics, and he shows the journey from Ptolemy as his theory of the motion of the heavenly bodies. As his calculations became more complex and eventually broke down, Copernicus was forced to rework them, placing the sun at the centre but keeping the core principles. These still were too problematic, and eventually, the revolution was precipitated by Galileo and finally enacted by Kepler, who jettisoned them for a system still in use today, with Newton later tidying them up to a single principle. Kuhn’s revolutions rely on one thing – not the pursuit of truth, as the new paradigm itself defines what it seeks to solve, but the way a community pursues its passion, the way a community must coalesce and evolve around a definition of the way forward. Kuhn’s theory has impacted not just science, but economics, political science, social science even the understanding of organised crime.

My world doesn’t deal with the massive ideas that physics does, but has its own revolutions. The Outdoor Learning Association (OLA) emerges as the new paradigm to move the sector forward. I have seen where the original paradigm has started to break down. AHOECs (Association of Heads of Outdoor Education Centres) and the other sector organisation’s original purpose have been reworked many times, as was Ptolemy’s. They are now straining at the seams to respond to issues of a world that has moved on with a landscape of members who may no longer fit the original mould. AHOEC can be reworked and tinkered with to make it work for a wee bit longer, but ultimately it is constrained by its long history and purpose.

The call was to ensure that the new paradigm had all the answers, but we missed the point. The new paradigm doesn’t have the answers, but redefines the questions we have in a sector that is now very different from the one we left three years ago, let alone thirty. OLA is the mechanism to ask them, perhaps in a different way than we have now. AHOEC may be recreated within its purpose, but the result will be to allow it to expand and become more than what it can be under its current guise. It should, however, have the weight to draw the community and provide an exemplar that we can gather around. This process is the catalyst for the frontier for amazing work to be done as the questions are worked out, with unique voices as a new community mingles, moves, shifts, and finds its new voice.

I am not looking for all the answers before I vote; that will never come. What I am looking for is a better way to frame the questions I have about the outdoor sectors’ future and the support for investigating them. When we vote to dissolve AHOEC, the IOL and the many other groups and become OLA, I will do it with a heavy heart for the history and weight of those that came before me, but with an open mind for the learning, community and frontier that awaits p

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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