Practises, Drivers and Barriers of an Emerging Regenerative Higher Education in The Netherlands—A Podcast-Based Inquiry
Abstract
:Highlights
- There are seven design practises that are emerging in higher educational practises across The Netherlands and Western Europe to connect universities with local transition challenges for more regenerative sustainable futures;
- The Regenerative Higher Education Design Practises Tool has the potential to be used to (re)design education to connect with sustainability transitions;
- Podcasting could be used as a form of qualitative inquiry within sustainability- and educational sciences.
Abstract
1. Introduction
- What are the design practises of educators actively moving towards RHE in (Western) Europe that connect with STs?
- What systemic barriers and drivers are experienced when engaging with these practises?
- What personal barriers and drivers are experienced when engaging with these practises?
The Emerging Transition towards RHE
2. Methods
2.1. Podcasting as Qualitative Inquiry
2.2. Research Context and Recruitment
2.3. Participants
2.4. Technology Used
2.5. Ethical Challenges
2.6. Analysis
3. Results
3.1. The Regenerative Education Design Practices Tool (REDPT)
3.2. (Systemic) Barriers and Drivers
3.3. Personal Barriers and Drivers
4. Discussions
4.1. Towards a RHE
4.2. Using the REDPT
4.3. RHE and Educational Technology
4.4. Podcasting-As-Qualitative Inquiry
4.5. Limitations of the Study
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A. Consent and Information Form
- If you have one, please be prepared to use a podcasting microphone for this interview.
- If you can’t do this, please use a set of earbuds like the ones that come with your smartphone. They provide higher quality sound than your computer’s native microphone.
- Please be in a quiet room for our call where you’re not likely to be interrupted. Ideally this is NOT a conference room or other large space with a lot of hard, flat surfaces. These create more echo and reverb than a smaller space with things like a couch or other soft surfaces.
- Please turn off your cell phone and notifications on your computer for our call.
- Our call with last approximately 90 min with time for a bit of prep ahead of the interview and to wrap things up at the end.
- Please note that the software only works in the CHROME browser.
- ○
- The story of your education that connects to sustainability, regeneration and/or place.
- ○
- What this experience was like for learners and the impact it had on you and your students.
- ○
- The barriers and opportunities you experienced during this story.
- ○
- Your vision of higher education in 5–10 years based on this story.
- ○
- A metaphor that represents the purpose of your education.
- How would you describe your education that connects Higher education to place and sustainability/regeneration?
- What is a week in this education like?
- How did you become involved with this education?
- How did this education become reality?
- What is it like to be a learner in this education?
- How has this education impacted you and the other learners?
- How would you describe this as metaphor?
- What are the most important mechanisms and qualities that make this type of education work?
- What were the (systemic) challenges you face(d) and opportunities you explore to do this?
- How would you describe your educational dream in 5–10 years?
- What is needed to make this hope new educational reality?
Appendix B. Visual Summary of Season 1 of The Regenerative Education Podcast
Appendix C. Visual Summary of Season 2 of The Regenerative Education Podcast
Appendix D. Visual Summary of Season 3 of The Regenerative Education Podcast
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Regenerative Education Design Practises | Description | Main Barriers and Challenges | Main Opportunities and Drivers | Design Questions | Indicative Quote(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tackling Relevant and Urgent Transition Challenges | Ensuring that the societal transition challenges that are chosen are part of learner’s reality. | A disconnection between institutional reality and larger societal challenges. The unpredictability of complex wicked problems and assessment. The educational practise of planning a year (or two) ahead, which limits flexibility. | Potential to create positive change, link HE to society, and subjective well-being. An ongoing change in funding bodies to a focus on more impact than bibliometrics. The emerging movement within universities and for educators to rethink their role in society. | Which societal challenges incite intrinsic motivation, or energy, for learners to engage with acting upon? What transition challenges are particularly impactful in a local place you can connect with? How can you continuously invite critical external stakeholders into this educational experience? | ‘It starts by giving space for students to express their own concerns, but also their curiosity and to use what I call existential questions and challenges as a starting point for learning.’ ‘We always need something that is urgent and relevant, so it needs to be important, and it needs to be important now.’ |
Embedding Locally with Systemic Awareness | Connecting your activities purposively with your local communities in place facing those challenges. | The time it takes to build and maintain a local community, as well as lacking finance and positions within HE cultures for such activities. The fragility of trust within such communities. The openness required to engage with such work and the frustrations that come from multi-stakeholder collaboration. | The interest in the creation of highly situated and contextualixed knowledge relevant to your own reality. The chance to connect community-engagement as part of your professional practise. The chance to enlarge your own professional network and ability in doing so. | What local communities who are already interested or involved with the transition challenge can you strengthen with your educational practise? What are the multi-level forces acting the strongest on the perpetuation of this unsustainable system? How can you use the richness of the world all around you as places of meaningful learning? | ‘I kind of hope that something… that this way of working in partnership with other partners. That…That… is carried more warmly within the universities. I don’t mean it in the way that I think that this form of education ‘is the future’ or that it replaces all other forms of education. But that it offers universities something… a possibility… to work more with society on grand challenges. Together with students, and in this case with people in the city but that could also be other places.’ |
Nurturing Supportive Innovation Ecosystems | Creating a supportive innovation within your practise/institution. | The culture of HE and agents that co-constitutes that culture such as accreditation boards, administrators, exam boards and curricula committees to stop more regenerative forms of education. The lack of space within educational design slows forms of inquiry. The history of students who have been shaped by the educational culture that imparts a consumerist approach to learning. | The potential to participate in the (re)definition of higher education and the relationship between the university and society. Emerging educational technologies that facilitate more ecological forms of education to flourish (particularly digital technologies that allow broader communities to be included). The call from more societal and political actors for universities to take an action role in local knowledge development. | Who are the key internal stakeholders that are positive towards RHE and how could these be invited to contribute to the co-emergence of this RHE? What are the limiting forces within the (educational) innovation ecosystem (e.g., administrators, colleagues, student’s backgrounds, policy) that must be navigated? How can you strategically create evidence, impact, or excitement, and in what media, for this form of education to continue and spread? | ‘Right. So, we’re all very much restrained in the current system. Well, aside from the fact that I find that really sad. I think there are cracks...you know, so I think it also has to do with a mindset and an attitude of trying to see the positive within the restraints that are currently there. So, can you how far can you go? How much can you do things different? In what way do you get support from your leaders to do it that way? In what way can you gain visibility for that?’ |
Cultivating Personal Transformations | Including the inner- or personal dimension of sustainability, or even regeneration, into your educational activities. Bringing your whole self and inviting learners to be psycho-spiritually and socio-emotionally vulnerable with both positive and negative emotions. | A fear, or lack of experience, of engaging with the psychological-spiritual and/or socio-emotional dimensions of learning. The strictness of assessment as ‘objective’ measures of learning. An underdeveloped ability to engage with the vulnerability that uncertainty for prolonged amounts of time brings. | The potential to influence the deepest leverage points for systemic change (those within us such as our values, perspectives, and worldviews). A more meaningful experience as an educator, including space for personal transformations for you, i.e., changing the world also changes us as people and by changing ourselves we change the world. The opportunity to engage with creative pedagogy-didactics such as arts-based approaches. | How are you including the inner dimensions of sustainability in a safe and meaningful way throughout the course? Where can you press so that it hurts just enough to trigger transformations? How should you meaningfully assess this inner sustainability work? | ‘We have a motto… ‘to think big and to act now’. And in that action, we want to fail fast and then we also want to learn fast. So when we work with sustainability as a lighthouse that provides the direction of where we want to go and why. And then you realize that navigating sustainability transitions, it is a bit about going into uncharted water, uncharted terrain. And you may have a lighthouse, but you have no idea what the waters look like on the way.’ |
Holding Healing Spaces | The importance of hosting spaces needed for deeper engagement that may nurture a sense of safety for transgressive dimensions of learning. | Not establishing, or disrupting, the safety within the educational context for learners to engage with the personal dimension above. A personal immaturity to acknowledge when professional help for this hosting is required. A financial limitation in the type or amount of support that can be offered for this hosting. | Freedom to engage with the richness of a place (e.g., forests, specific buildings, cafés, etc.) as educational spaces within your practise. The creation of a sense of community, within and beyond the course. The possibility to practise your own ability of hosting safe spaces for transdisciplinary learning. | Which actors and expertise’s, do you need to invite into this education to nurture healing spaces? How can you nurture a sense of safety in any surrounding when doing so? How are you inviting a sense of slowness into the education to focus on meaningful challenges and transformations? | ‘You can only feel the spear in the chest if you are willing to catch it. That’s the tricky thing of the spear-in-the-chest. You can throw them! But if no one is willing to catch them they don’t arrive and you don’t get the vulnerability, the crack, the chink in the armor that is needed to help people transform beyond something. So we really focus in our education on nurturing people’s willingness to catch the spears that we throw.’ |
Shaping Affirmative Imaginaries | Critically tackling systemic barriers and crafting more regenerative futures. | The lack of systemic and futures-oriented ability for teachers and within educational programmes. Tensions of having to be part of existing systems and maintaining relationships between them while disrupting them for alternative futures. The difficulty of acting on societal challenges within the timescale and from the position of HE. | Personal satisfaction in working towards a more equitable, sustainable, and just society. A chance to contribute to knowledge development and practise of global challenges within your own locale. The possibility of challenging even your own perspectives and futures, and the rich learning that can be had from that. | How can you challenge destructive mental models, values, worldviews and practises in ways that are tangible, experiential, and incite an emotional response? What are the potential leverage points to intervene in the innovation ecosystem to realize those futures? How can you create rewarding systems for students to engage in critically creative actions, including protecting them when they offend or transgress status quo? | ‘Because ultimately the message that we try to bring in our education…is that it’s the daily action of connecting others or connecting pieces of knowledge that were previously disconnected that can make an impact…an actionable impact on an everyday basis on the problem that you’re interested to address. So that’s the action part... to act because the underlying assumption being we have short time to know, pretty much left on on Earth, and we’ve got to act now more than ever’ |
Openness for Emergence | Being receptive for adaptation to the educational approach, structure, and design, as the course unfolds. | Receiving approval from the appropriate boards to engage with such an open attitude towards educational co-design. Dominant views of what may be considered ‘good’ education. A lack of epistemic and ontological humility that disrupts the educator from the role of expert to the role of co-designer. | An opportunity to learn more about ‘education’ and your role in it through such an open approach. A (strong) intrinsic motivation to link your educational practise with tackling systemic challenges. The possibility of learning more about the transition challenges by engaging with this work. | How much of your RHE can be left open for co-design? Who are you involving, and who are you not involving in the design and enactment of your RHE? What are the non-negotiables and why are they so in your RHE design? | ‘I think that trust is definitely a big one and it’s not easy. I sometimes literally feel my heart race when I come up with ideas of letting go of parts of control and keeping half of my curriculum open and undesigned when going into a course handing over the design of a final roleplay assignment in my master course into the hands of three or four students, which will completely design the final assessment and evaluation, including the form together with me. But it’s really in their hands. And letting go of that control is… it’s a leap of faith every time again.’ |
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van den Berg, B.; Poldner, K.; Sjoer, E.; Wals, A. Practises, Drivers and Barriers of an Emerging Regenerative Higher Education in The Netherlands—A Podcast-Based Inquiry. Sustainability 2022, 14, 9138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159138
van den Berg B, Poldner K, Sjoer E, Wals A. Practises, Drivers and Barriers of an Emerging Regenerative Higher Education in The Netherlands—A Podcast-Based Inquiry. Sustainability. 2022; 14(15):9138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159138
Chicago/Turabian Stylevan den Berg, Bas, Kim Poldner, Ellen Sjoer, and Arjen Wals. 2022. "Practises, Drivers and Barriers of an Emerging Regenerative Higher Education in The Netherlands—A Podcast-Based Inquiry" Sustainability 14, no. 15: 9138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159138