Black carrots and bug hotels: How learning for
sustainability can inspire PDP
Alison James - [email protected]
London College of Fashion
www.arts.ac.uk/fashion
Having recently organised a ‘caravan conference’ on the gargantuan themes of flexible and
sustainable learning, travelling across multiple sites on four days over two weeks, I have been on
something of a ‘green journey’ lately (no pun intended). While these events were designed to
deepen our understanding of what we mean by flexibility and sustainability I found many activities
offered rich material for PDP – despite the fact that none of them were explicitly badged to do this.
In ruminating on these experiences I will draw from Engaging Imagination: helping students
become creative and reflective thinkers (2014) which I have co-written with Professor Stephen
Brookfield, in which we stress the importance of creative approaches to reflection across
disciplines. This creativity was central to planning our events. While these took place at the London
College of Fashion, they are not fashion-specific, nor confined to any specialist arts or design
context. All they need to succeed is a conducive and receptive environment.
Orchestrating events was, as you may imagine, part logistical nightmare, part liberating adventure,
due to that strange alchemy of bringing people and their great ideas together and seeing what
happens next – including the unanticipated. To me this is part of the serendipitous nature of PDP
– or learning from the unexpected – and dovetails with work on the balance between hard and soft,
fast and slow thinking (Claxton, 1998, 1999) and the times when we force an issue and when we
stand back to see what might emerge (Pink, 2008).
We define PDP as something students do, while staff narratives of learning and development are
labelled CPD (continuing professional development). However I am going to use PDP to cover both
staff and student reflection on what they took from these events, as we ask similar questions in our
interrogation of practice, behaviours, thinking and values: to wonder how to make sense of
experience, work out who, where and what we are becoming, challenge what we know, learn how
to improve at something, handle things differently and so forth. Such questions are tools in the
ways we subtly shape our identity in all aspects of our learning, both lifelong and lifewide and
underpin our "individual learning ecology" (Jackson, 2014)
Through formal vehicles such as the HEAR, students can evidence some aspects of their learning
ecology but not its full territory. The kinds of events I describe here may not be HEAR material, but
are powerful ways of enabling students AND staff to feel part of, and act in, a learning community.
With an increasing emphasis on co-construction and co-delivery of curriculum/research/other
experiences, teachers are engaging more in joint or shared reflections with their students and
making their own learning more explicit to these students than perhaps they have in the past (see
also Brookfield, 1995, 2006).
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