Creating flexibility and innovation amid system failures
System shocks and disruptions in the arenas of energy, finance, climate, and health care are key forces of destabilization in this century. Institutional strategies that focus on resisting disruption and maintaining the status quo will not offer sufficient responses. Platforms for resilience - enabling responsive flexibility, distributed collaboration, and transparency - will allow institutions to meet such challenges through innovation, adaptation, and openness. As key points of convergence for health, learning, and environment, school communities will need to develop strategies for building resilience into their systems and for creating lightweight, modular infrastructures that can support the health and wellbeing of learners, families, and learning agents.
- What kinds of partnerships, transparency, and networks will be critical for building resilient school communities?
- What kinds of shocks might the education system face in the next decade?
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System shocks and disruption in the arenas of energy, finance, climate and healthcare are key forces of destabilization in this century.
In particular, the effects of climate change (extreme record heat and cold temperatures, natural disasters such as floods and tsunamis) and peak oil (a point we have reached in which global oil reserves grow at a decreasing rate and costs to refine it become unaffordable) will create major adjustments in behaviors and practices. Some school districts report that they have already spent their yearly gas budget midway through the year. And transportation patterns in many U.S. and European cities have shifted as a result of the increased price of oil, with ridership of public transportation options having increased dramatically.
Over the next decade, severely constrained mobility will alter the shape of community life as moving people and goods becomes too expensive. Incidents of extreme weather will continue to test basic urban infrastructures around the world. Combined with a volatile financial and credit industry, increasing chronic illness, and costly healthcare, communities globally will be tested for their ability to innovate ways to adapt to new conditions.
Institutional strategies focusing on resisting disruption and maintaining the status quo will not offer sufficient responses. This is as true for educational institutions and policies as it is for health, financial, transportation and other utility infrastructures. Autoimmune responses - those that seem to be institutionally rational but which actually further weaken inflexible systems - will characterize brittle institutions. Many argue that NCLB and severe constraints on social media (such as MySpace) in schools has only made things worse.
In contrast, platforms for resilience - enabling responsive flexibility, distributed collaboration, and transparency - will allow institutions to meet the system shocks of the next century through innovation, adaptation, and openness. As key points of convergence for health, learning, and environment, school communities will need to develop strategies for building resilience into their systems and for creating lightweight, modular infrastructures that can support the health and well-being of learners, families, and learning agents.
A core trend moving communities toward resilience is the emergence of smart localism. The combination of smart networking, data transparency, and bottom-up monitoring by engaged citizens using participatory media is shifting knowledge, power, and agency to the community. .
Super-empowered learning agents who embrace smart networking and new civic literacies will facilitate the growth of “shadow” systems in education - provisional learning communities, networks, and structures that meet local educational needs.
Learning grids - networked, modular learning infrastructures - will contribute to resilient educational platforms. For example, the UK’s Open University offers degrees and credentialing in many fields through low-cost open learning. India's Hole in the Wall provides residents with the opportunity to walk up to computer screens situated in a public wall, allowing anyone to explore computer tools, applications, and online environments. And an explosion of learning platforms such as iTunes University is expanding the possibilities for developing anytime, anywhere, ad hoc learning.
Implications for Learning
Schools are a critical nexus where these forces of destabilization will converge to produce major challenges for school-age populations, their families, and the broader community. They can be undermined by lack of trust, poor communication, and limited knowledge and capacity development, or they can become more resilient, networked communities that discover and share how to sustain learning and wellbeing. Supporting creative interventions at the school community level promises to position schools as centers of resilience.
- Rapid prototyping of solutions, harnessing the collective intelligence of broad school community, and sharing successes and failures will be critical for enabling stakeholders to respond appropriately to threats and create systems that serve the long-term learning goals of their community.
- Community audits from organizations and community initiatives such as DC Voice and Transition Towns, are examples of components of resilience platforms that can help communities generate the new solutions and patterns that will sustain them in the face of challenges.
- School decision-makers, community members, and educators need to think collectively about what constitutes the critical components of a flexible, modular learning infrastructure that serves all children.
- Looking outside the formal system - for example, in after-school programs, youth organizations, and community garden programs - might be a good place to start experimenting and prototyping resilience platforms.
- Creative use of new learning platforms, such as cell phones, iPods, and other mobile devices, can help to create learning infrastructures that are “off the grid”.