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Reality and perspectives: the use of role-playing pedagogies to create

scenarios of sustainability

Dr. Laura Colucci-GraySchool of Education

Aberdeen, 25th March 2011

Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability Seminar series

Sustainability

Controversial, contested, polysemantic

A nounwith roots into a verb

To sustain

Who? What?

Overview of this talk

• Role-play and its theorization from different fields;

• Some considerations about knowledge; • Notion of role-play as a flexible methodology

for creating contexts of knowledge production for sustainability.

Role-plays: a premise

Introduced as a response to school science education, in order to:

• Offer a learning context involving the learners in the first person on issues of individual and collective relevance;

• Re-connect school science education with real science;

• Stimulate learners’ participation and responsibility towards real and complex, socio-environmental issues.

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Topics

Current, unresolved, controversial issues:

• Acid rains• Water management and soil erosion in Sahel• Waste management

Experiences

In many different contexts and school levels

Decision-making processes

• Local and International scenarios; • Groups of students debate opposing opinions in

front of a commission of adjudicators;• Debate: win/lose; • Meta-reflection

reflection on oneself in role (feelings, perceptions about knowledge, decisions, personal and other people’s interests...)Cost-benefit analysis: weighing up facts and valuesReflection on learning(how, from, that, to...)

More recently:

Economic globalization and local/global interdependencies:

• the issue of intensive prawn farming in India;• high speed train in the Susa Valley;

We introduced the nonviolent transformation of conflict (Galtung, 1996).

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Picture taken at Roma Termini rail station (march, 2011.

“In the context of complex and controversial socio-environmental issues (…) new forms of knowledge production have to be elaborated (…) this entails the necessity, primarily epistemic and methodological, to extend public participation in decision-making processes” (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1999)

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Controversial issues and the Curriculum

• Early nineties: dominant view of science education is that of ensuring that the body of scientific knowledge is passed on.

• The paradigm of certainty

Controversial issues• Interdisciplinary• Uncertainty • Disagreement amongst experts• Need to make decisions and weigh up facts and

values• What knowledge counts?

• Whose knowledge counts?• How is scientific knowledge produced?

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• The objectivist and realist stand of scientific knowledge is confronted by a plethora of partial, subjective, local and value-based positions...

With the rise of controversial issues, a challenge is posed between the reality of partial views (as they all seem to have elements of truth) and the substantial nature of scientific truth.

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The problem of knowledge

• Content versus process;

• Knowledge versus skills;

• theoretical versus political (Priestley, 2010).

The problem of assumptions about knowledge and the purpose of schooling

(even more problematic in relation to science);

Simulations

• Taking on a role and acquisition of a ‘perspective’;

• Dramatization in role (use of natural and body language; acquisition of information and performance);

• Argumentation and debate;• Reflection on oneself and on the process of

participation.

Roles

By means of role-taking we assume an identity, with particular knowledge, concerns and manners of

speech;

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Roles (relational)When taking on a role, we enter a relational context where we act (or perform) and produce knowledge

• novelty and displacement, as we are asked to do things differently and do different things;

• Acquisition of skills • Setting of priorities and routines • Act from a specific social position (i.e.

Power and responsibility).

Role-taking: it involves the cognitive, social, linguistic and emotional spheres of our behaviours...

Perspective is an ordering... but an ordering of the visual phenomenon (Panofsky, 1991).

17Antonello da Messina Albrecht Dürer

Framing according to linear

time

Different points of

view

Different choices of language

(e.g. colour)

Dust Mohammad (c.1540)

Story of Haftvad and the Worm.

Compenetration of curved and

linear perspective

And the possibility to get into other

‘stories’

Knowledge and knowing

• Knowledge through roles is not given in the form of presentational knowledge (i.e. The role of the mother and motherhood)

• It is mainly experiential knowledge - bounded – by the socio-cultural context and personal experience of the role;

• It is skills-based knowledge (i.e. Multi-tasking; networking, getting up in the middle of the night...)

• It is social, cultural, linguistic, perspectival knowledge• And tuning in knowledge... Aimed at an adaptive

connection between the role and the context...

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Ambiguity

• Fitting in with what is expected - smooth performance;

• Limitations of the theatre: fixed context;• Context plays back: double loop as we are all

meaning-making creatures…

So performing a role is a way of fitting in with what is expected

But also gaining knowledge of different realities and points of view…(leading to reflexivity)

The symbolic dimension

• ‘As if…’: I were another person, in a different roleI acted in a particular context

We refer to the ‘life-world experiences’: shared experiences of transactions that constitute reality as we know it...

During the role-play, different points of view are shared

With the expression of different worldviews (capturing values, interpersonal relations, perception of oneself and the other)

In the present condition which may appear immutable and ‘given’...

A glimpse into the “as if…” and “what might be…”

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An epistemological necessity• Studies in the history and philosophy of science (e.g. Longino,

2002; Fox Keller) pointing to interrelationships between artefacts, social influences and philosophical assumptions.

Knowledge is always undetermined and provisional

• Embodied cognition: artefacts, including language, portray our perspective on the natural world and how we know what we know (hence establishing a close relationship between knower and known and knowledge and action).

Knowledge is partial and plural

• But we are all part of the same, complex and interconnected whole!

knowledge is reflexive and dialogical

Wikimedia commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blind.JPGSource:Phra That Phanom chedi, Amphoe That Phanom, Nakhon Phanom Province, northeastern ThailandAuthor: Pawyi LeePublic domain

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The consequences of our actions are only known a posteriori. E.g. Human pressure on biocapacity, climate and so on:

We can now say with some confidence that the increased rainfall intensity in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be explained by our estimates of internal climate variability" (Schiermeier, in Nature, Feb. 2011).

Certain events are potentially known but they are not measured because they are considered to be irrelevant, expensive or unlikely e.g. The additive effects of pesticides in the aquifers; on bees populations, respiratory conditions...

Some variables or processes do not even enter our mental schemata and do not acquire the status of variables eg. The biological components of the biosphere.

The complexity and interdependency of the natural systems are ignored, e.g. Ignorance of our ignorance.

An era of unpredictable consequences and ignored ignorances

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Post-normal science

Funtowicz and Ravetz, 2003

Uncertainty and ignorance

Values in dispute

Urgent decisions

High stakes

Acknowledges the complexity of

socio-ecological systems

A plurality of legitimate perspectives

A plurality of stakeholders

Relevance of human values

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The analytical stream focuses in investigating parts, and it emerges from traditions of experimental science where a narrow enough focus is chosen in order to pose hypotheses, collect data, and design critical tests to reject invalid hypotheses. Because of its experimental base, the chosen scale typically has to be small in space and short in time.

The premise of the integrative stream is that knowledge of the system is always incomplete. Surprise is inevitable. There will rarely be unanimity of agreement among peers —only an increasingly credible line of tested argument. Not only is the science incomplete, but the system itself is a moving target, evolving because of the impacts of management and the progressive expansion of the scale of human influences on the planet.

(Gallopin, 2004, p.6)

Sustainability science

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Inside a role-playdialogue

All mental activities involve taking on the other person’s role or perspective and we are exposed

to different languages, values, framings, methodological choices...

Epistemological and methodological dimensions are interconnected and made visible through

symbols and language

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Seeking the quality of dialogue

- Expression of plurality and ambiguity- Tolerance towards other perspectives and points of view- Self-reflection- Space for partial and complex narrations- Seeking re-connection between oneself and other and

between mind and nature

Episteme and phronesis – Aikenhead, 2009 – Ingold, 2010

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• Episteme: knowledge aimed at describing and seeking to understand the world

• Phronesis: knowledge aimed at taking actions in the world. Knowledge and action have a dialogical relationship.

Apparently different, or just complementary ways of seeing…

Everything has the character not of an externally bounded entity, set over and against the world, but of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots. Or in a word, things leak, forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them (Ingold, 2010)

Extracts from role-play on prawn farming

• Girl 1. Basically we can persuade the government that they are risky because ehm

• Girl 2. Well, because it offers no protection• Girl 1. And it makes the land full of salt, which means w can’t

grow anything even after they are gone• Girl 2. Ok, so it is basically, what that… ehm is? Is what is

called cause and effect, they are not thinking in the long run basically

• Girl 1. Yes because it means nothing will grow there so eventually the whole land will get covered in it

Data from Colucci-Gray, L.. (2009)

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Reflecting on language

Polarity between stability and change: in all languages, including science (nominal and verbal)

The verbal aspect is connected to the general culture and it allows for continuity (e.g. metaphor – cell; energy; work…).

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But the nominal aspect tends to prevail: by means of transmissive teaching and a lack of reflective ability:

So concept lose their explanatory power and lose meaning. There is a disconnection between the knower and what is known (Osberg et al, 2008).

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The interpretive act is the cognitive function that allows for a re-connection of the concept with the complex reality

And conflict?“By reworking the idea of the citizen as possessing a repertoire

of knowledge, the secluded spaces into which modern knowledge has condemned the nomad, the tribal and the informal economy are opened up (…).

To pluralise time is to pluralise the possibilities of life and living for cultures that do not follow modernity calendars. If time becomes unilinear and historical, the tribe might remain only as oral memory and the craft may only survive as an archive. The challenge here is mutual and reciprocal. The poetics of modern science lies in the multiplicity of time that it offers.”(KICS, p. 13).

Dealing with conflict• In a constructive manner requires opportunities…• listening postures towards the other (…oneself, one’s

body, another living things, colleague, friend, living creature…)

• Mental habits…

and practice…

From the triangle of violence (blame) to the triangle of nonviolence: distinction between people (for whom

you may feel empathy) and the problems causing the conflict

Groups 1st levelReacting to conflict

2nd levelProblem solving

3rd levelCooperative action

Duration of talk

A K. Ok Dr. Krishna, what do you believe?

M: I know what we could do. Why don’t we set up farms indifferent countries…

The profit is going directly to the villagers which means there will be no famine

6’

B S. So we could employ youT. But this is wrong! It is morally wrong!

T. I do not believe in the justifications of that

S. But what would you do? How would you do it?M. I think if possibly we could minimise it to a smaller scale than it is at the moment…

8’

C P. We are for and against

J. Your prawn farms are useless

- Circa 8’

D D. Bruce is the secretary here

S. We want natural food! We do no want GM!

- 4’

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The world can be narrated many times and in many different ways

• not ONE science but many different ways of knowing and interpreting the natural systems, which in dialogue with one another (epistemological pluralism);

• Re-formulation of the school where students-citizens are both critics and creators;

• Re-connection between content and competences: knowledge comprises a whole set of methodological, relational, linguistic and pedagogical elements.

• The teacher has the important role of facilitating dialogue, bringing forth a plurality of epistemic positions in an educating community…

• Recovering of nonviolence, the idea of limit and the possibility of being wrong…

In a perspective of democratic pluralism based on equity, the analysis of energy flows and matter transformations is no longer and not exclusively pertaining to the realm of technocratic expertise but it is process of collective concern and engagement which is founded on basic needs, cooperation and multiple space-time perspectives

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The disorder of ecosystems…

Discharge from soy-bean cultivation into the Mississippi river.

Toxic sludge oozing out of the bottom ofa shrimp pond.

Flood in Dhaka Bangladesh, 2009.

“Mad cow” disease

Smil (2008) expressed this concept in numerical terms: “ at the beginning of the twenty-first century a purposeful society could guarantee a

decent level of physical well-being and longevity, varied nutrition, basic educational opportunities and respect for individual freedom with annual TPES[1] of 50-70 GJ per capita (p. 387).

Constructive transformation is at the heart of nonviolence; perhaps the most

important acquisition of modern political culture and a requirement for entering a

sustainable phase of global socio-environmental change and… a change of climate.

[1] TPES (Total Primary Energy Supply): in 003 the absolute range was from 1 GJ pro-capita for the poorest African countries to the 450 GJ pro-capita of Canada.

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References• Aikenhead, G. (2008). Objectivity: the opiate of the academic? Cult. Studies of Science

Education, 3, 581-585. • Gray, D., Colucci-Gray, L. and Camino, E. (Eds.) (2009). Science, Society and Sustainability

Education and Empowerment for an Uncertain World, New York, Routledge.• Funtowicz, S. and Ravetz, J. (1999). Post-normal science: an insight now maturing. Futures,

31, (7), 641-646.• Gallopin G., Funtowicz, S, O’Connor, M & Ravetz, J. (2001). Science for the twenty-first

century: From social contract to the scientific core. International Journal of Social Science, 168, 219-229.

• Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means. (London, Sage). • Ingold, T. (2010). Bringing things to life: creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Realities working paper, n. 15. • Osberg, D. and Biesta, G. (2007). Osberg, DC, Biesta, GJJ (2007)

Beyond Re/Presentation: A Case for Updating the Epistemology of Schooling. Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education 38(1), 15-29.

• Priestley, M. (2010) Curriculum for Excellence: transformational change or business as usual? Scottish Educational Review, 42[1], 22-35.

• Smil, V. (2008). Energy at the crossroads. Global perspectives and uncertainties. MIT Press.• Kemp, M. (2006). Seen/Unseen. Oxford University Press.