Keynote Presentation at EDEN/UNESCO Open Classroom Conference, Kaunas, Lithuania - November2017.

1. The Joyous Voyage:
situating open learning in a fractured world
Dr. Alan Bruce
ULS Dublin
Open Classroom Conference
Kaunas, 10 November 2017

2. A time of questions
• What is really going on in our world?
• What will an uncertain future bring?
• Where does education end?
• What is the new labour market?
• What are we learning?
• How are we learning it?
• Why are we learning it?
• What do we value……..?

3. Situating Open
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading
wherever I choose.
Song of the Open Road
Walt Whitman 1856

4. Gathering threats
• Rationality under siege
• Unexamined impacts of the crash of 2008
• Rising fragmentation, hate and fear
• George Monbiot: “Out of the Wreckage”
Human beings have a unique capacity for altruism,
empathy and collective education
• Promise of open education cannot be fulfilled
without a parallel emancipation from the
strictures and modalities of neo-liberalism

5. 1. Open Education and change:
contexts
• Contours of pervasive change
• Crisis, challenge and the impact of growing
inequality
• Education and learning in a transformed
world
• Innovation and technology
• Globalization
• Embedding learning excellence with
uncertain employment outcomes

6. Anticipating the future (OECD
1994)
Future learning and employment needs (Jobs
Study)
•Policy change
•Flexibility
•Entrepreneurship
•Internationalization
•Technology

7. The future is now…
• Potential provision of universal schooling now
realized
• Internationalization is the norm
• Technology pervasive but unevenly accessible
• ‘Flexibility’: weapon or tool?
• Entrepreneurship: what is it?
• Policy: shaping or copying?
• Permanent crisis?

8. Defining directions
• Adaptability
• Innovation
• Leadership
• System change
• Intercultural imperatives
• ‘The chemistry of widespread improvement’
(Michael Fullan)

9. Open education: destination or
starting point?
• OER: “technology-enabled, open provision of
educational resources for consultation, use and
adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial
purposes.” UNESCO (2002)
• “…reducing the knowledge divide that separates and
partitions societies. Educators worldwide continue to
face significant challenges related to providing
increased access to high-quality learning while
containing or reducing costs.” McGreal (2013)
• What today is the public domain?
• Open to whom, for whom?

10. Neoliberal realities in education
• Higher education: globalized and competitive
• Rankings
• Marketization of HE
• Commodification of learning
• Hierarchy and elitism
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Social justice
Portnoi & Bagely, 2014

11. Innovative sustainable education
• Learner centered
• Competence driven
• Community focused – changed
communities
• Pervasive technological presence
• Internationally grounded
• Collaborative learning processes
• Curiosity and critical reflection

12. Open alternatives
• Access; Rights; Empowerment
• Openness creates challenges for established structures
and assumptions about teaching, learning,
understanding and knowing.
• Openness is continuously negotiated
• Four dimensions (Catherine Cronin 2016)
• balancing privacy and openness
• developing digital literacies
• valuing social learning
• challenging traditional teaching role expectations.

13. 2. Impact of socio-economic crisis
• Globalization – accelerating and pervasive
• Crisis and re-structuring since 2008 – not completed
• Stratification and inequity – issue of social justice
• Labor market transformation
• Assault on inclusion
• Integration, assimilation or denial?
• Understanding new diversities

14. A Transformed World
• End of old certainties
• No return to ‘normal’
• Population disruptions
• Planet of Slums (Mike Davis): hypercities of the future
• Accelerated change as a constant
• Constant connectedness and information explosion

15. The Open Bridge
• Need to move beyond rhetoric and hyperbole
• Need to demystify - probing contexts and patterns
related to socio-economic milieu
• Open discourse located between Access and
Citizenship
• Open as a bridge – not just transmitting data to
learners but enabling learners to contribute to
and influence the world of which they are part

16. Voices from the margins
• Refugee education
• Special education
Examples located in the realities of segregated
access, both historic and current. These are
litmus tests for how we conceptualize the
potential of transformative change.
Or not.

17. Refugee realities

18. Crisis since 2008
• Seismic shift in human relationships
• Refugee arrivals in EU in 2015: 1,3 million
• Children under 14: 140,000.
• Between 14-17: 62,000
• 2016: 340,000 by sea – 6,000 drowned
• Majority from Syria
• Growth of resistance and xenophobia

19. Reality on our doorstep

20. Supporting learning for refugees
• Focus on motivation
• Acknowledging trauma and loss
• From curriculum to competence
• Content to meaningful action
• From formal teaching to creation of bonds and
links and hope
• Mentoring
• Models of best practice

21. Responding to change
• Flexibility: non-traditional learning for non-standard
groups
• Diverse learners and traumatic pasts
• Learning outcomes and hopelessness
• Pedagogical design - integrated learning
• Teacher training
• Spaces of Hope – Lesvos. Early childhood learning

23. Special education: closed worlds
• Special education: ‘providing instruction specifically
tailored to meet individualized needs’
• Legacies of fear, stigma, ignorance, abuse, poverty.
• Moral improvement in the 19th
century: “the idiot can
learn”
• Stunning educational innovation in the asylum
• Alternatives possible if system challenged and
methodology opened
• Impact of institutionalization

24. Disability and open learning
• Hothouse of innovation
• Deepened vision of access
• Multidisciplinary focus
• Pioneering methodologies
Access to communication in the widest sense is access to
knowledge, and that is vitally important for us. We do
not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded that we
are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals, and
communication is the way we can bring this about.
Louis Braille

25. 3. Global citizenship for global
learning
• Engaging with diverse communities
• Developing massive outreach to sectors
• Outreach, access and validation
• Legislative foundations on rights and anti-
discrimination
• New technologies – mobile telephony
• Implementation of diversity practice and
intercultural competence

26. Global Citizenship
• Fostering inclusion in contradictory socio-economic
environment problematic
• Scale of economic disruption reflected in wars,
genocide, ethnic cleansing, health issues and
extraordinary movements of people either as
economic migrants or refugees – now permanent and
accelerating dimension of globalized life

27. Citizenship re-formulated
• Global Citizenship - Global Education First Initiative
(2012).
Education must fully assume its central role in helping
people to forge more just, peaceful, tolerant and inclusive
societies. It must give people the understanding, skills and
values they need to cooperate in resolving the
interconnected challenges of the 21st century.
• Citizenship reformulated in terms of rights and
obligations and potentially new forms of post-national
citizenship.

28. Inclusive global citizenship in
learning systems
• Changes produced in human aspects of the globalization process
shape how global education addresses various learning communities
previously excluded by reason of prejudice, discrimination or
remoteness.
• Critical importance of innovation and vision as key priorities to
develop learning to combat socio-economic marginalization.
• Pervasive globalizing process means intercultural learning strategy
needs parallel international understanding of how cultural diversity
impacts learning needs of populations subjected to unprecedented
levels of change.

29. Anticipating the future
• Excellence goes beyond quality measurement
systems
• Critical role of diversity and equality approaches
• Gender and inclusion – the centrality of women
• Demographics and youth intervention
• Competitiveness and sustainability
• Education as business or a place apart?
• Offering critical space and alternative
perspectives

30. Future directions: from open to
participatory
• Training of trainers and teachers
• Multilingualism: shared learning
• Developing skills – competence transmission
• Developing attitudes – securing motivation
• Developing buy-in – loyalty and commitment
• Active inclusion strategies
• Addressing pervasive poison of prejudice
• Review, evaluation and research

31. Conclusions
• Education at a crossroads: refugee crisis highlights
options
• ‘Progression model’ challenged
• Impact of increasing inequality: access and resources
• Crisis as the norm: open learning is a start
• Performance, standards, quality, reproducibility and
added value at the heart of competence: but context
equally crucial
• Disruptive narratives demand policy and shared goals
• Innovative learning demands imagination and vision

32. Whitman’s open optimism
O we can wait no longer
We too take ship O soul
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas
Fearless for unknown shores, on waves of ecstasy to
sail
Amid the wafting winds
Passage to India, 1872

33. Thank you
Dr. Alan Bruce
ULS Dublin
abruce@ulsystems.com
Associate Offices: BARCELONA - HELSINKI - SÃO PAULO - CHICAGO