Abstract
The complexity and multifaceted nature of sustainable lifelong learning can be effectively addressed by a broad network of providers working co-operatively and collaboratively. Such a network involving the third, public and private sector bodies must realise the full potential of accredited flexible and blended formal learning, contextual opportunities offered by enablers of informal and non formal learning and the affordances derived from the various loose and open spaces that can make social learning effective. Such a conception informs the new Lifelong Learning Network Consortium on Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies established and led by the Lifelong Learning Centre at Aston University. This paper offers a radical, reflective and political evaluation of its first year in development arguing that networked learning of this type could prefigure a new model for lifelong learning and sustainable education that renders the city itself a creative medium for transformative learning and sustainability.
Highlights
Living in the End TimesWe are living in a world that is predominantly urban, increasingly digitally networked but still desperately unequal and too obviously losing its biodiversity and ecological resilience
Nothing will come of nothing so the emergence of sustainable communities, urban regeneration and design, the development and application of low carbon environmental technologies can only arise from a network of learning webs, political and economic relations and structures, that draw on the resources, intelligences, skills and capabilities of institutions and organisations, groups and individuals that offer due recognition to being part of, rather than separate from nature
Instead resembling sites of social and cultural reproduction, such a lifelong learning, and its constituent networks, must become an ecotone which is understood and lived both metaphorically and literally. To put it another way, a lifelong learning perceived and practiced as an ecotone is a transition area where different communities of practice, and interest, may come together thereby generating a richness in thought, action, knowledge, skills, understanding, creativity and philosophy not found within any one section, group, institution or community or in the wider educational environment. This transitional space offers the potentiality and possibility of rupture and a new ground for sustainability learning that is in essence politically democratic and just
Summary
We are living in a world that is predominantly urban, increasingly digitally networked but still desperately unequal and too obviously losing its biodiversity and ecological resilience. For the philosopher Slavoj Zizek [1] we are living in the end times characterised, he says, by four antagonisms: the threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriate notion of private property when applied to “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments such as biogenetics: and, the creation of new forms of apartheid. To all this, he argues, our response can be Sustainability 2010, 2 characterised by ideological denial, anger, attempts at amelioration and compromise, depression and withdrawal. Complementing this reality we are in an age of technological silver bullets such as genetic manipulation and nuclear power, where the global corporate empire insists on being seen as responsibly tackling its rising ecological impacts [6]
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