Challenges with symbiotic learning, challenges for the PLL PLL-conference, September 5, 2016 (20 min = 6,5 sider), Olav Eikeland

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1 1 Challenges with symbiotic learning, challenges for the PLL PLL-conference, September 5, 2016 (20 min = 6,5 sider), Olav Eikeland In the Program distributed for this conference, it says I will speak about the Program for lifelong learning, that is, the PLL, and its challenges, and I will. I guess it won t be a big surprise, however, to say that the title and the subtitle for the conference, are the challenges for the PLL as well as for our whole institution and for our kind of institutions in general. I ll read the title and subtitle slowly: Main title: Challenges with symbiotic learning. Subtitle: Institutional, organizational, methodological, and epistemological challenges with reorganizing for extensive and systematic collaboration between formal higher education and non-formal and informal learning in work life and society. Although it goes without saying, I will say it: These are quite comprehensive challenges. I will use my 20 minutes trying to explain the meaning of these formulations and to translate some of them into slightly more ordinary language. It s all about the third task. The conference mail-invitation to everyone at the HiOA (Oslo and Akershus University College / Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus), says the challenge is all about the third mission or task for the institutions of higher education in Norway, and in a way it is. Norwegian public universities and university colleges do have a threefold mandatory mission: teaching, research, and a third task or mission. The third task contains everything from popularization to innovation and entrepreneurship, and extensive collaboration with surrounding communities and work life in organized development and learning. The third mission creates large and specific challenges for universities and colleges, not only in Norway but around the world. At the same time, the third mission is of particular importance for institutions like the HiOA, mostly educating for professional practice, and with ambitions of developing as universities with a special orientation towards work life and the field of professional practice. But how to solve the third task or mission optimally, is a question lacking simple answers due to its comprehensive and variegated character and because solving it has to happen in close collaboration with surrounding work life and communities. It also creates challenges because different ways of solving this task have different consequences even for the other two tasks research and teaching in all the educations and disciplines. The three tasks are not separate silos. They are interconnected. Hence, solving the third task creates institutional and organizational but also epistemological and methodological challenges. The questions are: What kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing, what ways of learning and teaching, are relevant and in 1

2 2 what ways, for a necessary reconfiguration of the knowledge triangle (of research, education, and innovation) of which higher education and research form parts? So, as it says in the subtitle, there are challenges in many fields. The challenge is institutional, because it concerns the relations to our surroundings and the mutual readjustment and reconfiguration of all three tasks, by looking at how different solutions of the third task influence the two other main tasks, research and teaching. It concerns what the Norwegian Employers Association (NHO) has coined as læringslivet or the learning life, with an excellent equivocal pun in Norwegian, which unfortunately doesn t translate easily into English. It concerns how to organize socially, or societally, in order for everyone and every organized activity to learn and improve all the way through life, both individually and collectively. The challenge is also definitely organizational, since finding ways of organizing and reorganizing appropriately for the third task internally at institutions of higher education, is a big challenge. I ll return briefly to this at the end, concerning our own institution. The challenge is also clearly educational, as different educational courses seek to collaborate and share responsibility for education and learning with work-life and communities through so-called university-schools, educational kindergartens, enterprisemasters or other similar terms, partly inspired by university-hospitals collaborating with universities in educating physicians. It s educational also by putting high on the agenda, the question of how to recognize previously, either non-formally or informally acquired competence and learning, the question of formal recognition of realkompetanse in Norwegian. In addition, the challenge is organizational not merely for the universities and colleges internally. The organizational challenge also goes to all collaborating work-life organizations, which have to scrutinize and reorganize themselves for both individual and collective or organizational learning in order to qualify for collaboration and shared responsibility in producing formally credited learning and education. The challenge is not merely a question of making the educational offers relevant and tailor-made for the more or less immediate needs of business and work life. Business and work life have to become relevant for the needs and academic requirements of higher education as well, by providing preconditions for transparent, effective, and verifiable learning from experience and reflection at work. Finally, the challenge is methodological and epistemological since what often appears to be different and partly contradictory ways of knowing that is, research based and experience based learning and knowing need to meet and be reconciled. It is curious and somewhat paradoxical that, in the social sciences, all kinds of observational methods have gained a place as varieties of data and empirical research, apparently except the personally, practically acquired life-experience of the practitioners or 2

3 3 natives, usually considered researched subjects. The ban on going native still seems to be prevalent. Why lifelong learning? So, why, and not the least, how, do we talk about lifelong learning? The clue is the comprehensiveness and many-dimensionality of the challenge as I have just outlined. It somehow requires a reconfiguration towards learning in all kinds of situations and contexts, throughout everyone s life. Some use the key-word lifelong learning to indicate either further education, or providing education, often rather elementary, for groups of people marginalized for different reasons. There is nothing wrong with these approaches. Each one is important in itself, and obviously included in any understanding of lifelong learning. It is just not the whole picture. Lifelong learning cannot be reduced to these. The challenges require us to look at the whole picture, the whole learning life or læringslivet, and how to organize for learning, that is, provide the preconditions for learning, in all fields and all phases of life, formal, non-formal, and informal in work, leisure, and education, from the cradle to the grave as the saying goes. So, calling it Program for Lifelong Learning seems appropriate to catch the comprehensiveness of the challenge. The PLL was initiated in 2013 as what we in Norwegian would call a faglig initiative, that is, an initiative springing from inside research and educational concerns and horizons. Our focus is on learning outside the formal educational system, and on the interaction or intersection between this and formal education, that is, on the interplay between formal, non-formal, and informal learning. In order to handle this, we have announced, from the start, seven focus areas or research areas, which we need to deal with, and which I will mention merely en passant here. They are: 1.The philosophy of education and learning, and the German-Greek Bildung-paideía, or in Norwegian dannelse, 2. The societal and historical organization of learning, seeing how different the relations between formal, non-formal, and informal learning have been in different cultures and different historical periods. 3. Lifelong learning in the more restricted sense, just mentioned. 4. Organizational learning or Learning organizations, focusing on collective learning in organizations and communities, 5. Work Based Learning and Training, focusing mostly on individual training and learning in practical settings, 6. Adult learning or andragogy as an internationally established field of research and practice, and 7. Vocational and Professional Education and Training abbreviated as VET. In Norway VET has a tendency to limit its attention to vocations being educated at the higher secondary level or high school level. In the EU, VET includes vocations 3

4 4 receiving their education on the tertiary level, that is on a college and university level. The PLL takes the second perspective as its point of departure. All of these seven knowledge areas represent aspects needed in order to deal professionally and research-based with the challenges. PLL intends to focus on these through both research and education, but also through development projects by approaching practically what has come to be called symbiotic learning. So, what is symbiotic learning? The conference title uses the expression symbiotic learning. The term has circulated in the PLL discussions for a while. It is an attempt to say something about what it takes to answer the challenges, mentioned in the conference subtitle, with reorganizing for extensive and systematic collaboration between formal higher education and non-formal and informal learning in work life and society. As already indicated, there is a constant and growing challenge in working with the third task, concerning how to formally recognize individual, previous, non-formal and informal learning. There are already ways of dealing with this, of course, but as long as everything previous to entering formal education is really informal and undocumented, the challenge remains. In response to this, symbiotic learning attempts to grasp or conceptualize a new modus vivendi of collaboration and shared responsibility, between institutions of higher education and work life, concerning learning. It requires not merely the formal recognition of previously non-formally and informally acquired individual competence. Work life organizations also need to organize and systematize both individual and collective learning in the work places, in order to qualify as equal partners in bringing people forth to formal recognition and credits in an educational system. As I said earlier, it s not only a question of adjusting educational offers from Academia to short term business and work life needs. It s also a question of adjusting work life to Academia by providing adequate learning preconditions, not just opportunities, in the work places. Although the general idea of what is needed, is not unclear, there are no fixed recipes for how to do this. Different models are conceivable and are being tested. In many ways, Norway is ripe for collaborative efforts like this, since we have a long tradition for collaboration in the work place and nationally between employees and employers in order to meet concrete challenges and development work. We have an equally long tradition for more formal collaborative agreements between work life parties and public authorities. We are, as indicated, already exploring different models of collaboration called university schools, and by similar designations, and the demand for continuous both individual and collective learning in work life has only increased over the last 30 years, both here and internationally. Moving in this direction 4

5 5 would probably be to develop a competitive advantage based on the pretty unique work life traditions in Norway, and in the Nordic countries. Challenges for the PLL But having some general ideas of principles and what direction to follow, is necessary but hardly sufficient, of course. There are a number of nitty-gritty, practical details that need to be in place in order to get anywhere. The challenges for the PLL, and for a broad specter of efforts at the HiOA, dealing with the third task, are also numerous and quite practical. Since the present conference gathers mostly people from the HiOA, I d like to mention some, beside the fact that challenges like these are hardly peculiar to our institution. As indicated, there are many current initiatives across faculties at the HiOA besides the PLL, which deal with or touch upon this third task, initiatives which partly overlap. The challenges posed through this conference are naturally informed by having the PLL as their point of departure. There are other initiatives like the School of Management (SoM), the Program for excellence in professional qualification (FPK) and a potential coming SFU (Center for Excellent Teaching), the Competence Center for Work Life Inclusion (KAI), the VIE or Value-creation, innovation, entrepreneurship initiative, the research program Healthcare, Caring, and Welfare (HOV), and several others. They all naturally have their own perspectives and approaches, and good reasons for existing. Most of them are not only overlapping but, even more, complementary and interconnected, as for example between PLLs organizing for learning, the management focus of the School of Management, and the teaching excellence of FPK and SFU. If they clarify their aspects of concern in some kind of division of labor, are coordinated in good ways, and collaborate, they may produce great synergies, as it is called. If they are not conscious of each other, are not coordinated, and do not collaborate but live parallel lives, the danger is great not only of stepping, or should I say trampling, into each other s gardens, of stumbling in each other s legs, and of some dominating the others, but also of overburdening both internal and external partners who necessarily are the same in most cases. Every basic internal unit at an institution like ours faculties and departments, that is get many calls for information and collaboration from both internal and external agents or agencies. If we have between five and ten, more or less well known internal agencies with strange abbreviated names like PLL, SoM, FPK, SFU, KAI, VIE, HOV, and others, wanting to collaborate in working with the third task or with aspects of it, queuing up in making calls and posing questions and demands to these basic units, one after another, both confusion and overload will predictably follow. 5

6 6 In order to get realistic and complicate this picture even more, I also have to mention the important fact that the HiOA over the last two years, have taken over the responsibility for four important institutes of applied social research with cross-faculty research tasks (AFI-WRI, NOVA, NIBR, and SIFO). I will not try to suggest how to integrate these into the efforts I m concerned with here, but they are definitely part of what has to be taken into consideration as well. This all goes to show that the challenges of coordination, collaboration, and complementary division of fields of labor, are real. I have addressed this challenge many times since I think confronting it is absolutely necessary. I think now the time has come for bringing everyone practically concerned together in a dialogue conference, a measure used successfully many times in Norwegian work life collaboration for bringing different stakeholder perspectives together in finding common ground and a course forward. As indicated, the same challenges are valid in our external relations. Enterprises, schools, NGOs, unions, employers associations, and others will also be confused and overloaded if all the different initiatives from the same higher education institution make separate calls for collaboration about overlapping subjects. So, the call for internal coordination and collaboration stands strongly. The question is only how concretely to organize everything into a kaleidoscopic unit where every part collaborates harmoniously, without differences being levelled out or homogenized away, and to avoid the opposite: a cacophonious babble. The last practical challenge I ll mention is related but does not concern directly how to coordinate the different partial initiatives on a high level in the institution. It concerns how each and every initiative, and PLL in particular, connects and organizes its relations to the basic institutional units, like faculties, departments, and not the least R&D groups, of which every department has many, differentiated mostly according to research themes. This doesn t have to be a challenge in principle but it definitely is a practical challenge, since everyone is so steeped in already defined ordinary plans, chores, and obligations. Since the different R&D groups already are divided according to research subjects which coincide or overlap more or less with the different partial third task initiatives mentioned, this is a practical management challenge at all levels of prioritizing the collaboration between local R&D-groups and cross-faculty initiatives like PLL and the others. I am approaching the end of my introduction. I hope to have done at least briefly, some of what I said I would, explaining the somewhat cryptic headlines for this conference, and to have set the stage for our other contributors who will discuss challenges similar to what I have outlined, based on their theoretical, empirical, and practical experiences from other countries than Norway. 6