Mankind has always engaged in lifelong learning but it has meant different things at different points in our history and this will always be the case. The contemporary world obliges people to learn and to keep on learning throughout their lives for a world in rapid formation. It’s a complex, hyperconnected, turbulent, often confusing and increasingly disruptive world.  It’s also a fragile world that cannot be sustained if we carry on using it in the way we have.
 
The idea that lifelong learning can be harnessed in the service of sustaining our presence in this fragile world is emerging in the thinking of the world’s global strategic planner. The wicked problem of our survival is framed by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which offers 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Education has its own SDG 'Ensure inclusive and equitable quality and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all'. This SDG gives education a new role – to educate the world in ways that will encourage behaviours that will support sustainable development.  
 
The UNESCO Futures of Education Initiative aims to rethink education, knowledge production and learning from a future-oriented perspective. The first report of this initiative (1) presents a future-focused vision that demands a major shift towards a culture of lifelong learning by 2050. It argues that the unprecedented challenges humanity faces, require societies to embrace and support learning throughout life and people who identify themselves as learners throughout their lives.
 
For this ambition to be realised there would need to be significant changes in culture and practice at a global scale. It requires a culture that transcends all other cultures, that values learning in every aspect of life. It’s a vision of a culture that reaches beyond the idea of “promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all” to the belief that “the whole of life is learning therefore education can have no ending” (2).
 
Perhaps the time has come to develop and enrich the concept of lifelong learning in the service of humanity and the planet, by embracing consciously and fully the lifewide dimensions of everyday life. I believe that the act of making the lifewide dimension of learning explicit would make a significant contribution to the goal of ‘a more holistic understanding of lifelong learning’ because lifewide learning gives day to day practical expression and meaning to lifelong learning. For lifelong learning is the accumulation of all our lifewide experiences and what we have learnt and become through them.
 
Lifewide learning (3) adds the detail and purpose to the lifelong pattern of human development by recognising that most people, no matter what their age or circumstances, simultaneously inhabit a number of different spaces - like work or education, being a member of a family and a community, managing a home, caring for others, engaging in sport and other interests, and looking after their own physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. So the timeframes of lifelong learning and the multiple spaces and places for lifewide learning will characteristically intermingle and who we are and who we are becoming are the consequences of this intermingling.
 
It is in the lifewide dimension of our life that we learn what it is to be human in the contexts of our own lives by discovering our purposes and what we value and care about. It is in this dimension of our life that we also learn about the world in all its diversity and confusing complexity, through the media we access, or the experiences of others we know, or through our own experience as we travel to cultures that are different to our own. If we are to create a culture that is committed to sustaining the world, it is the lifewide dimension of learning we have to nurture.

Through an education for sustainable development we can develop the knowledge to enable us to sustain our future. But we have to apply this knowledge in every part of our life and keep on learning how to do it for the rest of our lives, and that requires both agency and will.

It is precisely because every individual’s lifewide learning is a product of their historical and current interactions with their unique environments and circumstances, that they are the unique person they are. This is what makes us different from machines -everyone one of us is one of a kind and that is to be celebrated. It is also the real meaning of personalised learning and it provides a better foundation for understanding the scope and nature of lifelong learning as it is embodied, enacted and experienced by every person on planet.
 
The article was written by Noman Jackson who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey and Founder of ‘Lifewide Education’  

Lifewide Education is participating in UNESCO's Future of Education Initiative and this post is derived from the White Paper we have prepared to explain how lifewide learning can enrich the concept of lifelong learning. Click here to download the White Paper.
 
Sources
1 UNESCO (2020b) Embracing a culture of lifelong learning: Contribution to the Futures of Education Initiative Report : A transdisciplinary expert consultation UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning: Paris Available at: https://www.sdg4education2030.org/embracing-culture-lifelong-learning-uil-september-2020
2 Lindeman C (1926) The Meaning of Adult Education New York: New Republic. Republished in a new edition in 1989 by The Oklahoma Research Centre for Continuing Professional and Higher Education. Available at:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL14361073M/The_meaning_of_adult_education
3 Jackson, N. J. (ed) (2011) Learning for a Complex World: A Lifewide Concept of Learning, Development and Achievement Authorhouse Available at: https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-for-a-complex-world.html
4 UNESCO (2020a) Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. Paris  Available at: https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development
 
 

 

Dr Doug Cole (Nottingham Trent University & Creative Director Lifewide Education) 
Victoria Pendry (CEO The Curriculum Foundation)

Education needs to become more human-centred to support the future world of work and critically, success in life more broadly, anchored in learning across multiple dimensions. Given the current pandemic, this shift in focus becomes even more important. To successfully achieve this shift requires a new principle-based approach to learning, one that is holistic and research informed, inclusive and flexible, whilst still supporting consistency at scale. There is an urgency behind the need for this revolution in order to integrate learning and expertise from across multiple and disconnected disciplines and levels to tackle what is effectively a global challenge.

The ideal platform to launch this exploration is presented by UNESCO (2020:1) in their Visioning and Framing the Futures of Education paper, which states…the key question before us is: what do we want to become? This is a question to be asked and answered through education.

More commonly in education this is framed quite differently as, ‘What job do you want to do?’ In a metric obsessed world, policy, strategy, practice across all levels of education is dominated by numbers and league tables (Bridgstock, 2009, Cole and Hallett, 2019). Taking employment rates as a significant measure of success sits at the heart of this challenge, but this dominant quantitative focus runs contrary to the desire for a more humanistic approach. This dilemma demands an urgent shift in what we potentially value in the future and as a result, what we measure.

What kind of world is 2050 likely to be? Barnett (2000) and Jackson (2011) ten years ago described the future as ‘supercomplex’. Bauman (2000) even twenty years ago referred to a ‘liquid modernity’, a condition of constant mobility and change in relationships, identities, and global economics within society. In 2020 these views and conditions have been amplified further through increased globalisation, the use of technology and the current pandemic.

How can we learn to thrive in this supercomplex world? We argue for the need for a more structured, yet flexible approach, creating scaffolding within which a wide range of organisations could potentially operate. Rooted in transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000) this perspective aligns with the principle-based world-class curriculum developed by the Curriculum Foundation. Nottingham Trent University, UK are currently piloting a new taxonomy for learning called Employability Redefined which is built around these very principles. This framework for learning is presented in full as an animated 3D model  https://vimeo.com/413211412). 

The taxonomy incorporates the following three distinct layers of learning:
1 Lifelong and Lifewide
2 Resilience and Self-Efficacy
3 Knowledge, Experience, Identity, Interpersonal /
Intrapersonal and Transformative Reflective Practice.

Employability Redefined argues that all learners should experience opportunities across each dimension included in the taxonomy above, each one being equally as valuable as the other. The specific learning outcomes contained within each of these three dimensions  should be owned, defined and shaped by those stakeholders involved. This ensures that this is not a restrictive one size fits all approach. An underpinning rationale and flexible scaffolding of this nature  can be applied at scale across all levels of education. From this perspective we argue that there is an urgent need to reflect on how our current models of education map to this scaffolding. How can we best support learners across each of these dimensions so that they are able to flourish in an uncertain and complex future?

Critically, this new taxonomy aligns with underpinning research from across a number of different disciplines (Cole, 2019, Dacre Pool and Sewell, 2007, Fugate et al., 2004, Jackson, 2011 and Tomlinson, 2017), something that is not clearly evident at a policy, strategy and practice level currently. The potential application of this new organising framework across the lifespan of education may just deliver on our aspirations for this more human centred, future facing approach to education for 2050. The focus becomes the needs and demands of tomorrow, not only for the now.

Reflecting on the question raised by UNESCO (2020) earlier, Barnett (2000) 20 years ago stated that the question of ‘who am I?’ is critical to the development of learners. This still remains at the heart of the challenge to our education systems today, and requires us all to ask questions of where, when and how this is effectively being addressed with our learners. The importance of identity  needs to become much more of a central consideration in any future approach to learning for both work and life more broadly. Fugate et al. (2004), Hinchcliffe and Jolly (2011), Holmes (2001) and Tajfel and Turner (2004) have all explored identity and the world of employment, yet this valuable research again has largely failed to have an impact on education, the focus for learning or on our curriculums in practice.
In this ever-changing world, Bauman (2000) and Barnett (2011) make the case for the need for all of us to be able to reflect, adapt and transform what and how we learn. This is certainly a more fluid and advanced perspective in comparison to the current dominant mantra promoting a more linear and static view, commonly articulated in lists such as the 21st Century skills, which somehow when possessed are seen as the solution.

Globally we need to embrace these more diverse and richer aspects of humanity and learning that increasingly connect us. We should recognise the value of existing cultural philosophies such as Ubuntu from South Africa (I am because we are) and the Maori philosophy of Whakapapa (To define a person’s position in respect of others, ancestors in particular). Both of these examples align with the academic research highlighting the importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal learning in the taxonomy, supported by the work of a number of authors including Cole (2019), Cole and Hallett (2019), Dacre Pool and Sewell (2007), Fugate et al. (2004), Gardner (2003), Mayer and Solovey (1997), Sternberg et al. (2000), Tajfel and Turner (2004) and Tomlinson (2017).

Subject knowledge and understanding remains core to any future educational offer. However, the narrative needs to diversify to also include other aspects of our sense of being, attitudes, behaviours, values and character. In addition, the overly simplistic notion of ‘skills’ cannot continue to be viewed as just being concerned with what we can functionally do as individuals, it has to also be about who we are as human beings, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or background. Without looking through this more holistic and inclusive lens, we will simply continue to invest millions in skills development, training people for jobs that we know they will leave (Hawkins, 1999), for reasons that likely have nothing to do with their technical capabilities.

This more inclusive view of how we should approach education in the future needs to also recognise and acknowledge the strengths we have as individuals, no matter in what form these are demonstrated. Whilst technology continues to advance, we need to keep apace, however we must equally continue to focus on other more human dimensions for learning as highlighted here and within the Employability Redefined taxonomy. In so doing, we strengthen our chances of developing a more connected, supportive, collaborative and compassionate society in the future, capable of adapting within the turbulent and ever changing world we live in, truly embracing the concept of both lifelong and lifewide learning. We must ensure we can remain both technically and psychologically capable of thriving in the future, both in the workplace and beyond.

The new Employability Redefined taxonomy seeks to reposition thinking and practice around employability and education to develop a sharpened focus around the combination of several dimensions for learning (Cole, 2019). Many of these may currently be evident in places, but their true value commonly being implicit, hidden from the learners themselves and not explicitly connected and addressed in practice, at scale and across all levels of education. In part this again stems back to what the government and media currently value and the way success is measured.

In summary, this new taxonomy forms the basis for a more integrated approach to learning, opening up possibilities to simultaneously support multiple strategic agendas across education, including enterprise, widening participation, retention, attainment, mental health and wellbeing.  Achieving all this is made possible by specifically highlighting the dimensions for learning that underpin each of these currently disconnected individual priorities. We must shift the common and dominant discourse globally beyond simply securing a job and gaining skills (Higdon, 2016). In doing this, we will develop a much richer and holistic narrative and view of education and learning. this view makes the often implicit, explicit, illuminating the opportunity to redefine our future approaches and models so that they might better support not only the world of work, but the quality of our lives and society more broadly.

References and underpinning literature
Artess, J., Hooley, T., & Mellows-Bourne, R. (2017). Employability: A review of the literature 2012 to 2016. A report for the Higher Education Academy. York: Higher Education Academy.
Bandura, A. (1982) Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American psychologist 37 (2), 122
Barnett, R. (2011) Lifewide education: A transformative concept for higher education? In N. J. Jackson (Ed.), Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, education and personal development (pp. 22-38). Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Print.
Cole, D. (2019) Defining and developing an approach to employability: A study of sports degree provision, PhD thesis, Northumbria University
Cole, D. and Hallett, R. (2019). The language of employability. In J. Higgs, G. Crisp and W. Letts (Eds.), Education for employability (Volume 1): The employability agenda (pp. 119-130). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Brill Sense.
Cole, D. & Tibby, M. (2013). Defining and developing your approach to employability: A framework for higher education institutions. York, England: The Higher Education Academy.
Dacre Pool, L. and Sewell, P. (2007) The key to employability: developing a practical model for graduate employability. Education and Training Vol. 49, No. 4, pp277-289.
Department for Education (2017) Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework Specification. London: Department for Education.
Fugate, M., Kinicki, A.J. and Ashforth, B. (2004) Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications. Journal of Vocational Behaviour, Vol 65, pp 14-38
Gardner, H. (2003) Multiple intelligences after twenty years Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 21, 2003
Hawkins, P. (1999). The art of building windmills: Career tactics for the 21st Century. Liverpool: Graduate into Employment Unit.
Higdon, R. (2016) Employability: The missing voice: How student and graduate views could be used to develop future higher education policy and inform curricula, Power and Education, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp176-195
Hinchliffe, G., and Jolly, A. (2011). Graduate identity and employability. British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp563–584.
Holmes, L. (2001) Reconsidering graduate employability: the ‘graduate identity’ approach, Quality in Higher Education, Vol. 7, No.2, pp112-119.
Jackson, N. J. (2011) Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, education and personal development. Bloomington, IN: Author House.
Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall
Mayer, J. and Salovey, P. (1997) What is emotional intelligence? In Salovey, P. and Shulters, S. (Eds) Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Development. New York: Basic Books
Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult: Core concepts of transformation theory. In J. Mezirow and Associates (Eds.), Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 3-33). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Rutter, M. (2006). The Promotion of Resilience in the Face of Adversity. In A. Clarke-Stewart & J. Dunn (Eds.), The Jacobs Foundation series on adolescence. Families count: Effects on child and adolescent development (p. 26–52). Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J, Forsythe, G., Hedlund, J., Wagner, R., Williams, W., Snook, S. and Grigorenko, E. (2000) Practical intelligence in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (2004). The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behaviour. In J. T. Jost & J. Sidanius (Eds.), Key readings in social psychology. Political psychology: Key readings (p. 276–293). Psychology Press.
Tomlinson, M. (2017) Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability. Education and Training, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp338-352.
Williams, S., Dodd, L. J., Steele, C., & Randall, R. (2015) A systematic review of current understandings of employability. Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 29, No. 8, pp 877-901.

​A Permanent National Necessity…’: Adult Education and Lifelong Learning for 21st Century Britain
Dame Ruth Silver is President of the Further Education Trust for Leadership
 
The 1919 Ministry of Reconstruction Adult Education Committee’s Final Report – better known as the 1919 Report – described adult education as a ‘permanent national necessity’; not a luxury that would be nice if only there weren’t lots of other competing priorities, but something indispensable to the future of our democracy, as well as to our health, happiness and prosperity.
For the past two decades Adult education has been the subject of regressive and short-sighted funding cuts as policymakers have found themselves gripped by a vision of education in which young people feature disproportionately and only economically useful skills are deemed valuable. This meagre economistic view of education needs to be challenged and consigned to the dustbin of education policy history.

We need a new, more rounded and comprehensive, lifelong vision of education, which is why the Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL) was pleased to fund the work of the Centenary Commission on Adult Education, set up by a group of adult educators who recognized the significance of the 1919 Report and undertook to set out a new vision ‘for life-wide adult education for the century ahead’.

Their final report, ‘A Permanent National Necessity…’: Adult Education and Lifelong Learning for 21st Century Britain, argues that ‘“universal and lifelong” access to adult education and learning is as necessary now as it was in rebuilding our society in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars’, and sets out a range of recommendations that go beyond the acquisition of skills for employment to include basic skills, active citizenship, creativity and health and wellbeing, alongside the world of work.

The life-wide focus of the report is welcome indeed, as is the proposal for a new national strategy for adult education and lifelong learning that engages ‘the whole of Government while recognising the importance of devolved decision making’. Putting these proposals into practice, and moving with purpose towards a lifelong learning society, demands that we work in a different way, across departments and sectors, with an unprecedented degree of collaboration.

The report is a hopeful one. Its recommendations are practical and achievable. But realising its vision will require something more, as the report acknowledges: a change of path, away from a society characterised by fear and anxiety, where inequality is tolerated and lives are routinely wasted or written off, to one in which people are valued in the round, not just as economic units, and where the link between education and active democracy is fostered and encouraged.

The report appears at a time when the political, demographic, social, technological and environmental challenges we face call for adult education and lifelong learning to be taken much more seriously. There are signs that we are beginning to do this, and I strongly welcome them. These challenges demand a population that is resilient, creative, critical, engaged, excited and ready to learn, as well as one that is job-ready. The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in adult education, but whether we can afford not to.

Editor: Lifewide Education welcomes this vision for the future of adult education in the UK.  Clearly, we have a role to play in helping people, educators and policy makers understand what lifewide learning means and supporting them as they engage in learning through and across their whole life.
Source: https://fetl.org.uk/inspiration-thinking/blogs-think-pieces/a-new-vision-for-lifelong-learning/

This issue of Lifewide Magazine is dedicated to Professor Michael Eraut who died in 2018. Through his research, Michael made an enormous contribution to our understanding of how people learn in work place settings and how they learn and develop through their work. Michael was a good friend to me when he was a valued member of our team at the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education at the University of Surrey between 2008-11. In his role as Research Fellow he contributed to the development and application of the idea of lifewide learning and  education in the        undergraduate curriculum.
 
The University of Surrey was, and is, committed to the development of students as novice professionals, as they participated in their year long work placements, and their part-time jobs. Michael’s research into how early career  professional’s learned in the work  environment, provided a much needed evidence base on which to develop our educational thinking and practices. He cared a lot about making his scholarship and research available and accessible to higher education practitioners so that it might benefit students on their journey towards becoming professional. He contributed to our publications, our research, our conferences and our conversations. Through his contributions he enabled the SCEPTrE team to appreciate the particularities of learning and developing in the work environment and in this way helped us develop our concept of a lifewide learning and a lifewide curriculum.

​In 2010 SCEPTrE made a ‘Lifetime of Learning and Achievement’ Award to Michael in recognition of his contributions to this important field of educational research and practice.  In this special issue we remember some of Michael’s contributions to SCEPTrE’s work and our lifewide learning and education project. When our SCEPTrE project came to an end  in 2011 I anticipated that I would work with Michael again. The opportunity came in 2017 when I began working on a book, with Ron Barnett,  on ecologies for learning and practice. I immediately contacted Michael to see if he would join us but was saddened to learn from his wife Cynthia that Michael was now suffering from dementia. Looking back, I can see how Michael’s insights influenced the development of my ideas on ecologies of practice. 
 
Both knowledge and learning can be examined from two perspectives, the individual and the social……An individual    perspective on knowledge and learning enables us to explore both differences in what and how people learn and differences in how they interpret what they learn. A social perspective draws attention to the social construction of knowledge and of contexts for learning, and to the wide range of cultural practices and products that provide knowledge resources for learning (1 p1) An ecological perspective combines and integrates these different perspectives.
 
I am grateful to have known Michael and it gives me pleasure to show my appreciation of his friendship and scholarship by dedicating Lifewide Magazine #22 to his life and work.
 
Reference
1) Eraut (2007) EARLI 2007 Theoretical and practical knowledge revisited  http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/176013.pd
 
Norman Jackson
Founder Lifewide Education & Commissioning Editor Lifewide Magazine
Director of SCEPTrE 2005-11

Jerome Brunner once said, “We seem to have no other way of describing "lived time" save in the form of a narrative. Which is not to say that there are not other temporal forms that can be imposed on the experience of time, but none of them succeeds in capturing the sense of lived time.”(1). So the creation of stories by ourselves is a means of describing and making sense of our own life as we have moved through time.
​
There are no stories more meaningful than our own biography, but unless you are a famous person it’s likely that your story, in all its fantastic richness, will die with you. Think of all the billions of stories that have been lost in the history of mankind. The stories we create about our life, serve many purposes but perhaps the most important is to reveal to ourselves and others that our life has meaning and purpose.
Our life is a story, more accurately a multitude of stories that we can imaginatively fashion into a narrative that brings a sense of coherence to what otherwise might seem a hotpotch of events and circumstances. Creating a life narrative is a deeply human and ecological phenomenon in the sense that it connects us in our present. It involves us selecting and remembering specific moments, circumstances, people and relationships in our life, making stories about these things then connecting and weaving the stories into a narrative to create the meaning that is our life. Of course there are good and bad experiences and lots of loose ends, lost opportunities and unfulfilled ambitions, but our life narrative is a heuristic to help us make sense of and value our life as a journey and help us answer those existential questions like ‘why am I hear?’ Our life story captures our appreciation of our own existence in the great story of humanity and reflects the identity’s that we have created for ourselves.

We tell the stories of our life to our children to illustrate something important we have learned and in this process we reveal to them the person we were and are. Whenever we meet someone new we search for common points of reference, usually through stories of ourselves and our past and current life. We might draw on our lived experiences in conversations with friends and with colleagues at work again to illustrate a point and to convey to them the sort of person we would like them to see, and perhaps hide the stories that are not so complementary. As we tell these stories to ourselves and others they become the narrative of our life. As we weave our stories into a larger narrative we integrate different parts of our lives. The narrative becomes the means to integrate the different dimensions of our lifewide experiences into the journey that is our, past, present and possible futures.
  
The ecologist in me see’s the question of why we create and tell stories as a complex multi-dimensional and relational phenomenon – we create and tell our stories for many different reasons and they serve many purposes during our lifetime. We are adept at drawing on them for motivation and inspiration. We are good at using them to relate and empathise with others when a suitable moment emerges in a conversation. They are particularly valuable in helping us sustain and develop the relationships we have developed with family and close friends. In this way they are profoundly important to an ecological concept of humanity. We use them to illustrate to the people we are nurturing, some profound truth or insight we have discovered through the ups and downs of life. We construct them to help us make sense of our own reflections and create memorable thoughts that we can share. We commandeer them to promote ourselves and like a politician we spin them to show ourselves in a favourable light. We use them to heal ourselves and to create our sense of wellbeing and spirituality, to come to terms with our disappointments and regrets, and we make use of them to be thankful for the experience of living the life we have been so fortunate to have had. And when we chose to record our stories using a particular medium we move our story from our imagination to some new artefact which we have made and in this act we extend our creativity.

The importance of life stories and narratives to us and to the people who know and love us, was brought home to me recently when a close friend was diagnosed with a degenerative disease which means she will, in a matter of only a few months, lose her memory. I offered to help write her life story for her children. She willingly accepted  and I spent over 3 hours recording the stories of her life and the lessons that life had taught her. It was a privilege to listen to her telling her stories knowing that she trusted me to communicate it when she could no longer do so for herself. What struck me was the multiplicity of stories that she wove together in a life well lived and how certain experiences or defining moments shaped in a profound way her personality and her future life. Furthermore, when integrated into a narrative these revealed her character, her beliefs and her values. 

I have been affected by the experience and it created a need to explore, through Lifewide Magazine, the idea of personal stories and narratives. Through the contributions of others we were interested to discover how, when and why we create life stories and narratives for ourselves, or when we help others create their life narratives, and the effects and consequences of engaging in such acts. We were interested in the means by which narratives are recorded and communicated  - what technologies, if any, are used to bring a story to life and enable it to be shared. We were interested in understanding what it means to create such narratives and how places, people, objects, events or situations stimulate the need or desire to reflect on and recount our stories and narratives. We were interested in how the creation of our life narrative formed in the past, influences our present and our future, our sense of identity and who we would like to become.

The magazine is free to download from the magazine webpage
http://www.lifewideeducation.uk/magazine.html

(1) Jerome Bruner Life as Narrative Social Research Vol 71 : No 3 : Fall 2004 691-710

Norman Jackson
Commissioning Editor
Lifewide Magazine

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)
(ESD) is commonly understood as education that encourages changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to enable a more sustainable and just society for all. ESD aims to empower and equip current and future generations to meet their needs using a balanced and integrated approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development (UNESCO).
 
This requires quality education and learning for sustainable development at all levels and in all social contexts including Higher Education. It means including key sustainable development issues and goals into teaching and learning practices. For example, learners should be made aware of such issues as poverty alleviation, peace, ethics, responsibility in local and global contexts, democracy and governance, justice, security, human rights, health, gender equity, cultural diversity, rural and urban development, economy, production and consumption patterns, corporate responsibility, environmental protection, natural resource management and biological and landscape diversity.
 
ESD means viewing our educational institutions and systems as living dynamic eco-social systems dedicated to the formation and development of knowledge and the encouragement and support of people's learning so that both individuals and the societal ecosystem as a whole cannot only be sustained but flourish.

ESD requires participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behaviour and take action for sustainable development.

• Human sustainability in teaching: includes elements such as resilience, wellbeing, emotional intelligence and the role of personality and gender as a teacher
• Educational sustainability: comprehends open pedagogies, our legagy as a teacher, engagement with communities and society, and lifelong and lifewide learning (including digital capacity)
• Social and environmental education: gathers these issues within each ecological environment and with reference to our contribution to society as educators

Lifewide and ecological perspectives on sustaining people and their environments
​Lifewide education encourages a more ecological approach to learning with the goal of enabling learners to develop themselves through all their experiences while at university so that they can sustain themselves through a lifetime of dealing with challenges and disruptions that they cannot begin to imagine8. Ultimately, universities have a moral responsibility to not just prepare learners for entry to the job market, they must enable learners to prepare themselves for the rest of their lives. Lifewide Education believes that adopting an educational approach that embraces the idea that a person’s learning and development is an ecological phenomenon involving themselves as whole creative beings interacting with their material and non-material world, provides a productive way of engaging with the ESD agenda. It aligns well with Daniel Wahl’s proposition(3):
 
‘It is time for designers — and all humans are designers to some extent — to think out of the box and assume responsibility of the effects or their actions’

Stephen Covey gets to the heart of the matter through his habit of making particular and considered choices. ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space lies our freedom to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and happiness.’(9) In the choices we make lie the means of sustaining ourselves and the world. The central proposition where sustainability is concerned is choosing to respond to a particular stimulus in a way that considers the wellbeing of others and future generations, not just our own wellbeing. At the heart of sustainability is a bigger purpose than ourselves. This is where education for sustainability plays an important part in informing the decisions we make about what we choose to do and what sort of person we chose to be. Lifewide Education argues that we can enhance our ability to respond by seeing our own practices as ecological deeply connected to the material and biological world and the people in it in ways that only we can see and appreciate, and which only emerge in the course of our actions.

​Sources
1 World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future file:///C:/Users/norma/Downloads/our_common_futurebrundtlandreport1987.pdf
2 Rittel, H and Weber, M (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning Policy Sciences Vol 4 155-169
3 Wahl, D,C. (2018)  Introduction to the Worldview Dimension of Gaia Education’s course in ‘Design for Sustainability’ Age of Awareness https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/introduction-to-the-worldview-dimension-of-gaia-educations-course-in-design-for-sustainability-1577b7e4f460
4 UNESCO (2014) Shaping the Future We Want: UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) Final Report. Paris: UNESCO.
5 United Nations (2015) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. www.un.org/ sustainabledevelopment.
6 Leicht, A. Heiss, J. and Byun, W.J. (eds)  (2018)  Issues and trends in Education for Sustainable Development UNESCO Available at:
http://www.sustainabilityexchange.ac.uk/files/unesco_issues_and_trends_in_education_for_sustainable_development.pdf
7 PBL (2017) International Cooperation for the Sustainable Development Goals in 23 Infographics, PBL Nederlands Environmental Assessment Agency.  Available at: http://www.sustainablesids.org/knowledgebase/pbl-people-and-the-earth-the-sdgs-in-23-infographics-2017
8 Jackson N J et al (eds) (2011) Learning for a Complex World: A lifwide concept of learning, education and development Authorhouse
9 Covey, S. R. (1989) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People  Simon and Shuster
10 Judson G (2018) Cultivating Ecological Understanding And Engagement With The World Through Imaginative Ecological Education (IEE) Lifewide Magazine #20
​11 Jackson, N. J. (2011) An imaginative lifewide curriculum in N J Jackson et al (eds)  Learning for a Complex World: A lifewide concept of learning education and development Authorhouse

Image credits 
Diverse peoples cartoon artist  Lai Meng-chia
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/photo/2016/07/01/2008135365
Wicked Problems Diagram Original source: CMU Transition Design, Irwin & Kossoff 
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/facing-complexity-wicked-design-problems-ee8c71618966
Children caring for the planet artist Ana-Karin Engberg taken from 'Children’s Voices about the State of the Earth and Sustainable Development' A report for the OMEP World Assembly and World Congress on the OMEP World Project on Education for Sustainable Development 2009-2010 July 2010  
 http://www.omep.org.se/uploads/files/congress_report_child_interviews_-_final.pdf