Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.     

Using the ‘Grieving’ Process and Learning Journals to Evaluate Students' Responses to Problem-Based Learning in an Undergraduate Geography Curriculum

This paper offers a critical review of the role of the International Network for Learning and Teaching geography in higher education (INLT) in the production of geographical knowledge. Through an examination of the Network's membership and activities, it explores some of the ways in which INLT—as a global virtual group—may be inadvertently perpetuating geographies of oppression through, for example, assumption of Anglo-American modes of educational standards and practice; reinforcement of existing unequal/inequitable social relationships; predominance of English language; and a reliance on technologies that favour wealthy nations and institutions. The paper sets out practical suggestions for postcolonial membership and activity structures designed to overcome difficulties with the Network's existing power/knowledge geometries.     

Learning from the RSPT mistakes: is reform still possible?

The political ramifications of the failed Resources Super Profit Tax have been widely documented, yet the causes of this political failure are more contested. Many accounts highlight the discursive power of business and the effectiveness of their campaign against the mining tax. Effective business activism certainly played its part, but this article argues that strategic failings on the part of government also influenced the outcome. This article highlights how the Labor government's failure to consult, to understand the political implications of federalism and above all its impact on the industry in the hope that future policymakers will learn from the mistakes of the mining tax debacle.     

Media coverage of the Queensland drought rorts saga: Learning Fitzgerald lessons?

Many observers saw die performance of Queensland's main media group in pursuing the National Party government in 1989 over allegations of drought‐aid rorts, as an indication that the compliant and manipulated media identified by corruption commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald, QC, had shown new teeth in their watchdog role. But a close examination of die coverage shows that the way the media operate has changed little, and that there needs to be continuing concern about the effectiveness of a media system in which a parochial orientation leads not to closer scrutiny of decision‐making but to closer cooperation with decision‐makers as news sources.     

Learning mobility: high-school exchange programs as a part of transnational mobility†

Long-term high-school exchange is a popular way to go abroad for German youth (2.5% of 16-year-olds go abroad for 6–12 months). The ongoing research project is dealing with the long-term impact of high-school exchange programs on further mobility of the participants. Using an online survey among 3000 former exchange students and 30 qualitative focus interviews, it is shown that mobility reproduces itself. Six years after the exchange, about 80% of the respondents have been abroad again for a period of longer than six weeks. This is seen as part of a normalization of transnational social practices.     

Globalization and Economic Restructuring in Ontario: From Industrial Heartland to Learning Region?

Recent contributions suggest that the current period is characterized by a paradoxical consequence of globalization in which the ever greater integration of national and regional economies into the global one accentuates, rather than minimizes, the significance of the local context for innovative activities. This paper sketches out the implications of this argument by drawing on the case of Ontario, Canada's largest province and industrial heartland. The restructuring triggered by the broader processes of globalization was accentuated after 1990 by Ontario's deeper integration into the North American economy following the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the US and its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement. These changes forced a number of critical responses on both firms and the government of the province, as they face the challenge of becoming more innovative and adopting the characteristics of learning regions. This experience is highly relevant to regions elsewhere that are attempting to shift their traditional industrial base to a more knowledge-intensive economy.     

Learning by ‘design’: how undergraduates in Singapore learn to become engineers

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the evolving norms and dispositions of creativity and enterprise of engineering students using data gathered from a newly established technology and engineering-focused university called ‘UniTech’ located in Singapore. Based on interviews with students, we seek to explain (1) what they learn, reject, adopt and appropriate; (2) the kinds of challenges they face and (3) the unexpected and serendipitous outcomes of their learning. Through an integrated engineering curriculum focusing on design, students learn to be technically competent, creative and entrepreneurial persons. This paper considers how the curriculum works as a set of formal procedures preparing students for a future ‘knowledge-based economy’ imagined to be technology-intensive, dynamic and filled with opportunities but also increasingly uncertain. We analyse how students at UniTech negotiate this design-focused curriculum where experiences of creativity, open-ended possibilities and holistic perspectives intersect with the national economic agenda of a knowledge-based economy.     

Whose space is it anyway? Learning about space to make space to learn

The significance of the environment in which children learn has long been recognised as one of the key elements that can have an influence on the experience and success of education. Usually understood from an adult perspective, here children’s views are interpreted on the educational space that was designed for them. These perspectives are illustrated through using Lefebvre’s Triad model. This includes the perceived, conceived and lived spaces, including the added dimension of time interpreted through an educational lens. The data demonstrates the value of children’s renegotiation of functional space through visual narratives. Deeper understanding of the uniqueness of individual children’s experiences offers opportunities to re-examine the space in alternate ways, which Lefebvre’s model has facilitated. Whilst recognising that the school space needs to be functional, the negotiation of space with children can be approached creatively and still support unique yet diverse pathways to learning.     

Learning from history? From Soviet collapse to the ‘new’ Cold War

Many moments in what we now rather lamely call the ‘end of the Cold War’ have been examined in detail. However, within the extraordinarily rich literature that has arisen over the past 25 years, little attention has been paid thus far to one very important problem: the part played by ‘history’ in shaping the way different actors tried to make sense of what was going on around them in a time of rapid transition.     

Dwelling in the Virtual Sonic Environment: A Phenomenological Analysis of Dancers’ Learning Processes

This article discusses the Embodied Generative Music (EGM) project carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM in Austria. In investigating a new interface that combines motion capture and sound processing software with movement improvisation and performance, I focus on dancers’ learning processes of dwelling in the virtual sonic environment. Applying phenomenology and its concepts, I describe how dancers explore reversibility of sound and movement to shape this connection in an artistically expressive manner. The article proposes that dancers build bodily knowledge through both the sonic environment and their own passive and active, intuitive and deliberate, movement choices. While dwelling in a digital environment changes dancers’ habitual manners of behaving, it opens up to them new kinds of kinaesthetic opportunities of intimacy and pleasure in motion. The findings from this research reveal the importance of bodily interaction with virtual environments in developing new movement-based interfaces.     

Insights into Transforming Regional Gender Relations—A Call for Space-Sensitive Dialogue to Enhance Regional Learning

The European Union (EU) constitutes a space that offers a wealth of opportunities for regional learning. This article addresses how the learning process takes place in an interregional project and how contextual factors affect the learning process. The work presented here draws upon theories on regional learning and the dissemination of management ideas, as well as taking agency and structure components into account. The internal project arenas are investigated in order to shed light on the learning process and how spatial relations play a critical role. A conclusion is that the learning process within EU financed projects will gain from developing the practice of reflection and space-sensitive dialogues. One challenge to be dealt with is the relationship between the metamessage of the project, and local variations and various gender narratives.     

“博物馆学习”还是“场馆学习”:试论Museum Learning的中文表达

Museum learning的相关研究范式和成果主要集中在博物馆学观众研究和教育学教育技术研究领域中。国内这两门学科对museum learning的翻译存在分歧:博物馆学界将其译为"博物馆学习",而教育学领域则将其译为"场馆学习"。原因在于二者对museum learning的研究方法存在分歧,以及二者对"博物馆"一词本身范畴和概念存在认知差异。"博物馆学习"不仅保持了museum在跨语境研究中的一致性,更重要的是在概念上确保了自然科技类博物馆和历史艺术类博物馆在museum learning研究中的相同地位,这是"场馆学习"一词无法体现的。     

Is the Future of Mobility Electric? Learning from Contested Storylines of Sustainable Mobility in Iceland

Planning for sustainable mobility is a complex and demanding task and the knowledge of how to trade off multiple, often conflicting, goals is not entirely clear. One of the most contentious and confounding issues in the context of urban planning has been, and continues to be, the place of the automobile within the evolving sustainable mobility paradigm. The recent emergence of strong policy and planning support for the introduction of electric vehicles raises thorny questions as to whether or not this development will be complementary to, or conflicting with, other sustainable mobility planning goals, such as the pursuit of compact cities, restrictions on automobiles, promotion of walking and bicycling, and support for public transport. The results of a recent pilot study conducted in the Reykjavik city region suggest that a strategy of provision for electric vehicles on a large scale may represent a continuation of the dominant transport engineering approach, drawing scarce financial and institutional resources away from path-breaking measures such as the efforts to create denser development patterns and promote non-motorized and public forms of transport.     

Benefitting from Learning Networks in “Open Innovation”: Spin-off Firms in Contrasting City Regions

R&D and innovation increasingly take place in networks that extend beyond the boundaries of a single firm, with customers in an important role in the learning processes involved. This phenomenon is captured by the term “open innovation”. Advantages of open innovation encompass cost reduction and an increased competitiveness. Spatial innovation theory however indicates that the potential of open innovation is not the same for all urban regions, there may be differences between large metropolitan areas and small cities. In this context, the authors compare university spin-off firms in two contrasting urban regions in Europe, Delft in the Netherlands and Trondheim in Norway (a metropolitan area versus an isolated city) with regard to the profile of their learning networks and the contribution of these networks to growth. Learning networks appear to differ in structure and strength, in spatial configuration and also in the influence on job growth. Thus, networks in Delft (in a large metropolitan area) tend to be stronger compared to those in Trondheim (isolated city), whereas the influence of network strength on growth tends to be negative in Delft but positive in Trondheim. Overall, firms in Trondheim tend to rely more on own resources and capabilities and less on learning networks in open innovation.     

Learning to love the republic: Jacobin propaganda and the peasantry of the Haute‐Garonne

The political societies, or Jacobin clubs, formed during the first years of the French Revolution undertook as one of their many projects the political and civic education of the peasantry. The political society of Toulouse, the large republican administrative centre of the south‐western department of the Haute‐Garonne, was particularly active in this mission. By 1790, society members had embarked upon a campaign of written propaganda, using both educational tracts and revolutionary almanacs. However, this initial method was of only limited effectiveness, due to the prejudices of urban society members with regard to the peasants, the widespread illiteracy and non‐comprehension of French in the countryside, and the difficulty of distributing written material to isolated villages at the end of the eighteenth century. The Jacobins of Toulouse attempted to conquer these obstacles through the composition of tracts in the local patois, the use of peasant‐oriented newspapers delivered to local, literate intermediaries, and finally, the sending of their own members into the countryside as political missionaries, armed with leaflets and a copy of the constitution. By the time political clubs were made illegal in 1795, the influence of Jacobin sociability had greatly facilitated a precocious political acculturation of rural communities, prefiguring their more complete politicisation during the course of the nineteenth century.