Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Community Action for Spaceship Earth (CASE) Project Initiative A draft proposal for an ENIRDELM sub-network

Who are we?

Members of the ENIRDELM network who are seeking to ‘make a difference’ by focusing educational leadership and practice on urgent contemporary realities and encouraging young people to make a social impact for ‘a better more sustainable future’. 

How did the CASE initiative start?

Participants in a workshop at the 22nd ENIRDELM conference in Portoroz, Slovenia responded to an invitation to move from theory to practice relating to the social reconstructionist  view that schools and higher education institutions can make an impact on their local communities and promote ‘global consciousness’ and ‘world citizenship’.  

What are we proposing?

An international project targeted on educational leaders (institutional leaders, teachers and their developers) to promote action in schools and higher education that will lead to community action by students to address the widespread passivity about urgent global problems that threaten the coming generation.

These global issues stem from the finite limits of the natural world that are rapidly being exceeded or approached by the impact of human activity driven by growth economics. We use the tag “Spaceship Earth” to emphasize the finite nature of our planetary home whose capacity to support the well-being of the ‘crew’ is now being overshot.

The amazing developments in information and communications technology can be used to build and strengthen the networking of community action across the world by joining together various nuclei of innovations in educational leadership and practice.

Why do we propose this Community Action for Spaceship Earth (CASE) Initiative?
1.        Because of urgent but ignored global problems facing us all

Humanity, in ten generations of exponential growth has reached an unprecedented range of knowledge and technological developments that have created a massive capacity to modify nature. At the same time, we are surrounded by societal and ecological problems.
 

This critical state is largely ignored due to:

·           lack of perception or social imagination about impact on the planet of humans and ways of preventing limits to sustainability. Out-dated assumptions persist about humans and nature and the hope of unlimited economic growth. ‘Utopian thinking’ about a harmonious and peaceful world is dismissed as hopelessly idealistic.
·           lack of sense of agency among large sections of humanity when faced with seemingly insoluble problems, complex issues and social  mechanisms on a global scale. Many of us feel largely powerless even in our personal lives to influence global processes.
·           lack of ideas about exactly what to do in the education arena which is overwhelmingly dominated by the drive to focus on the ’GNP ideology’ of competitiveness in the globalised market by producing students who will contribute to national economic growth.
·            lack of freedom or scope to encourage community action on ‘glocal’ issues  due to  the imperatives of "common core content and PISA standards" and many forces of inertia and  vested interests of those currently driving education systems.

This leads to a paralysis of will and passivity on the part of potential socially active citizens and educational leaders.  In a world dominated by corporate interests with vested interests in maintaining the dominant individualistic-materialistic ‘Western worldview’ and unlimited economic growth, such passivity suits the needs of those in power.

2.       Because we offer a vision of change for students, teachers and school leaders.

We are committed to: 
·           the vital role of the youth in the processes of social transformation towards a desirable global future. Due to their limited investment in and attachment to the status quo, their natural idealism and entrepreneurial drive, and their plasticity and learning capability, young people are best suited to act as trailblazers or “revitalizing agents” for a truly human and ecologically sustainable future global society. They have potential to develop both social imagination and a sense of agency.
·           developing social and global imagination of educators and their students that will release capacities for learning and lead to local action for global purposes. 
How might the CASE initiative proceed?

The CASE initiative therefore will focus on:

1.       Educational leadership and teacher in-service education programs initially in Finland, Latvia, Slovenia and Sweden.
2.       Setting up networks of schools within each country with the support of the program leaders and participants
3.       Sharing experience internationally between these national programs and networks using the established resources and conference opportunities within ENIRDELM.

What would the community action involve in schools and universities?

The process involves four phases in line with well-established procedures of action research.

Phase 1: Needs identification - With a team of teachers as their mentors, students form small groups to identify global (”Spaceship Earth”) issues, developmental needs and possibilities in local contexts (’glocal’ issues). They conduct interviews, observation, documents and media analysis in the local community to discover on what to focus their actions. Each community action group would create and ‘own’ the focus for action but, for example, students might:

·         make presentations and seminars within and outside their institutions;
·         use the internet and social media to provide relevant links to some of the world’s best scientists and researchers;
·         lobby local politicians about ‘glocal’ action needs that students have identified;
·         promote local environmental and recycling initiatives and relate them to a sustainable global future;
·          provide voluntary support for relevant NGOs; etc.

Phase 2: Deep analysis preceding action planning - the teacher team sets up learning sessions in order to help the students reach a deeper understanding of their identified themes as a prelude to planning socially transformative action. This phase includes contacting experts and local organizations, as well as acquiring various resources.

Phase 3: Action Planning - The student groups make a concrete plan of action with long and short term goals starting with a vision of desirable future states and then planning backwards in time, step by step, to the present day state of affairs. This phase also involves recruiting more participants and contacts for the project.

Phase 4: Action and formative evaluation - The project is implemented with continuing evaluation. Students and teachers reflect critically on their community action in order to learn and improve their impact.