An Ecosemiotic Model for Learning: Designing experiential curriculum in a distributed globally learning network

Pavel Cenkl, Director of Learning at Dartington Trust & Head of Schumacher College

July 2021

This is a companion post for a poster presented at the 21st Annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Stockholm, Sweden, July 26-29, 2021

Please note this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

What could higher education look like if we understand and engage with our world as a complex, integrated socioecological system? 

This post outlines both theoretical framework and practical application of resilient learning networks in an ecologically-focused experiential higher education curriculum delivered in a hybrid online and site-based context. An ecosemiotic approach to curriculum design and delivery is introduced that situates humans as deeply enmeshed in a complex sympoietic network. 

This multi-scale learning network is always already in the process of co-becoming, manifesting a world in which organisms communicate always in an unfinished processual dynamic.

A globally distributed site-based experience can build a far more resilient learning network than existing site-based, online, or hybrid higher education allows. 

Our covid-influenced present and unpredictable future demand radical revision of higher education’s traditional forms of delivery. An ecosemiotic approach to scaffolding distributed site-based learning can help make a pathway toward a resilient, adaptive, and multi-scale curriculum.

For an outline of the distributed learning model, listen to my segment “Experiential Learning in the Digital Age” with Sophie Bailey on the Edtech Podcast

An ecosemiotic curriculum model includes:

    a) Development of new network identities and ecologies for interspecies collaboratory spaces

Experiential learning is grounded in interspecies collaboration through enactivist approaches to help learners explore their relationships with the more-than-human world through embodied practice, site-based experience, and participant reflection.

It is essential to support learner understanding and exploration of interweaving network identities — from online learning networks to socioecological networks to local and bioregional networks that underscore the complexity of a multi-sited, multi-temporal, multi-species, and transdisciplinary learning network. Such an understanding must be embedded in the context of programme structure, delivery, and class rhythms.

For more on ecological models for learning, see my 2017 SXSWedu presentation “Ecology as a Model for Teaching” and my SEAD (Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design) white paper, “A New Ecology of Learning: Ecological Systems as Pedagogical Models“

    b) Framing learning in a distributed global learning network (DGLN) in the context of our situatedness within a complex socioecological system

A distributed global leaning network is based on ecological systems and affords learners active co-creative engagement with delivery, projects, and assessments. Attributes include: non-linear dynamics; unpredictability; sympoietic co-organisation.

A globally distributed model integrates a diverse range of site-based experience from different locations in the world and thus creates a rich, complex ecosystem of experience shared across students and engaged with across reflections and formative and summative assessments. In a master’s programme, the breadth of socio-ecological engagement can build a broader, more solid and ultimately more resilient foundation for a final project or dissertation.

    c) Deployment of learning clusters of colocated off-site students to enable face-to-face collaboration and experience when travel is not possible

On-site facilitation is key to support learners’ sensual engagement with more-than-human actors that are subsequently shared through both synchronous and asynchronous multi-media. Relationships with global partners able to support and facilitate student experience around the world is a key component to a successful and vibrant DGLN. Indeed, such a network fosters genuine collaborative two-way learning due to the unique nature of global site-based learning. The pedagogy and curricular frame are held online and enriched by a breadth of experience across the different participating sites in an approach that underscores decoloniality through the sharing and application of global ways of knowing and practice.

For example, in a postgraduate module on soil health (MSc Regenerative Farming, Food and Enterprise at Schumacher College), the course would frame theory and research methods whilst drawing on local knowledge, traditions, methods, and understanding of local socioecological networks in sites with very different climates, soil structures, and seasonality.

A good entry to work on ecology and decoloniality can be found at: “Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices
for a more ethical ecology” by Christopher H. Trisos , Jess Auerbach, and Madhusudan Katti  in Nature Ecology & Evolution 24 May 2021

    d) Equitable site-based facilitation of experience-based learning for all students, whether on or off campus

A key challenge for hybrid learning is the ability to provide equitable experience for on and off-site learners. An adaptive and distributed curriculum must be grounded in facilitated site-based experience through a robust learning network.

Typical hybrid or hybrid-flexible learning blends synchronous and asynchronous online learning to support simultaneous learning for students both on-site and off-site. The learning in the majority of settings is centralised and focused on the delivery of information and assessment. In a distributed model, learning is the network (to echo George Siemens’ Connectivism: Learning as Network Creation (2004)), and relationships among students, teachers and the more-than-human world are the foundation for a process-based enactivist approach to collaborative experiential learning.

    e) Implementation of Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLEs) that integrate a self-organised set of tools to complement the use of a VLE or LMS. 

NGDLEs comprise a complexity model and empower learners to identify appropriate tools for connecting ecosomatic practice and ecosemiotic engagement. Tools must be simple, student-aligned, and alive. If the development of a suite of online tools adapts to the systems-approach to learning, they can be adapted from simple platforms already used by students and supported by a learning management system (principally only as a platform for delivering content). In a co-created learning network, the tools may evolve and vary based on need, accessibility (including government censorship and bandwidth access).

For more on NGDLEs, visit the research published at Educause by Malcolm Brown, Jeffery Pomerantz, and D. Christopher Broooks. “The NGDLE: We are the Architects” is a good place to start.

Ultimately, an ecosemiotic approach to learning can help build a more regenerative and resilient model for higher education. A regenerative approach continually enfolds, adapts, and participates in complex socio-ecological system dynamics through acts of interspecies listening, co-creation, and collaboration. Further, an understanding of multi-level and large-scale socioecological resilience factors can help learning programmes to build a resilient relationship between human and more-than-human participants.

These factors include (summarised from “How to conceptualize and operationalize resilience in socio-ecological systems?” by Marjolein Sterk, Ingrid A van de Leemput, and Edwin THM Peeters in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2017 (28)):

• Maintaining diversity — among learners, tools, experiences, approaches, and means of access to learning
• Establish and cultivating connectivity among network participants
• Being receptive to feedbacks in an authentically regenerative model
• Embracing complex thinking to enable new connections, new collaborations, and innovative ways of thinking that draw on a diversity of models — effectively leveraging a complex socioecological learning network to build new ways of knowing and practice.

Finally, a regenerative learning model — such as those developed at Schumacher College and Dartington Trust — grounded in an ecosemiotic approach that recognises the essential role that the development of place-based knowledge and practice through experience across diverse sites around the world is a key component of the future in the rapidly changing landscape of higher education.

For further information, contact Pavel at pavel.cenkl@dartington.org