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Cooperating with head hands hearts: Dialogue with Anne Winther

Anne Winther is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and community activist who is co-creating community transformations and new approaches to sustainability. We talked about Anne’s involvement with a new cooperative university, related to her work with the the Centre for Human Ecology based in Glasgow, Scotland. I was intrigued to learn what was holding her attention.

AnneW:  I was doing some background reading for our call and I like the word “gathering” that you and Steve are using to describe the Chalmers meeting. I’m also finding that simply talking about things isn’t enough. It’s about doing, getting on with it. Now this is the time for getting on with it.

Hilary: I couldn’t agree more. Totally share your concern for wanting to get on with things.  I  was just talking with a PhD student before our call.  She is in some despair about the research program she’s in. She wants to do action research and she brings great professional skills. But like many students she finds that there is no space for her to engage with the community change issues she cares so much about.

AnneW: It’s such a waste of talent. It’s part of why I am working with bringing the Co-operative university into being here in the UK. We’ve been having a generative dialogue to build the foundation to create the new university. So it’s very exciting.

Hilary: Tell me a little more background if you would.

AnneW: When I finished my PhD, and that was in 2014, I couldn’t easily go into an academic role. I was a square peg in a round hole. I fell upon the U Lab course with Otto Scharmer and through U lab ended-up going through a process of personal change. And one of those transformational moments for me was joining the Centre for Human Ecology. My phd had focused on sustainable development

Hilary:  I feel some connection around scholarship that can be more responsive to sustainability demands.

AnneW: I began to see that my work with my PhD and sustainable development was all in the head. I had come to see that balance of heart and hand is key. This balance is essential for human ecology. And it’s key at the Centre for Human Ecology, where I am now one of the voluntary directors. It’s founded in the Scottish generalist tradition, which is a transdisciplinary approach, and balances the head, the heart and the hand. And it is rooted in the Gaelic culture in Scotland.

Hilary: Fellow Celts. I used to be a Gaelic speaker, but I have been away from Ireland for years.

Anne: There are indigenous Gaelic threads running through the Center. We got a reasonable sized grant last year. We’re now building a curriculum which is very exciting and may become part of the cooperative university as well.

Hilary: How is the head, heart, hands balance now?

AnneW:  The heart is present in the connecting with the communities and becoming able to engage with them in change. I’m involved not only in the development of the co-operative university, but I’m also involved with networks which are challenging the very basis of education.

Hilary: Sounds like you’re asking a key question: What is the purpose of education?

Anne: And also what are we building with education? Is education for building capability within people to increase their personal wealth and, increase social mobility or is education for the betterment of society and addressing the crisis that we have in the planet and social inequality.

Hilary:  That purpose question is so crucial. Tell me more about your dissertation – was it alive there too?

AnneW: It was a study of three rural communities in Scotland. The quantitative aspect was, for three communities, measuring their ecological footprint. The qualitative aspects were holding focus groups, engaging in conversation and delving more deeply into what it was like to live in their communities. It was lovely actually to have the two aspects together, qualitative and qualitative.

Hilary: I hear that it was participatory- was it also transformative and action oriented  – or whatever terms you prefer. I mean in the sense that could include first person research and provoke better futures.

Anne: It didn’t have those first person aspects, although now looking back on it, I’m using the experience to help my own thoughts and actions now.

Hilary:  I find generally that people who are action oriented, tend to choose dissertations that inform the rest of our lives. And I use a broad definition of action research. Sometimes first-person work is a part of that transformative effort and sometimes it is just not appropriate. It’s a conscious choice.  I’d love to hear more about the Cooperative Uni.

AnneW:  The Centre of Human Ecology had an aspiration to become a cooperative. Partly this was to address the challenge of how do you fund an institution that is very radical in its approach. How do you make it financially viable when it cannot easily attract mainstream funding. We could see the need for continuing courses. But there are fewer people able or happy to pay relatively high fees to take a masters course. So the Centre had an aspiration to become a cooperative. This would mean that the students would not just co-produce knowledge, but also be co-producers of the organization as well.

Hilary: We don’t know much about that though I am thinking the Mondragon model has existed successfully for a while.

AnneW: We built a relationship with the Cooperative College in Manchester which was founded 99 years ago.The person who founded the college wanted to make it a university. But in 99 years they’ve never been able to do it because historically, and up until this year, to become a university in the UK required Privy Council approval. The Privy Council are the senior governing council in the UK and are related to the monarchy. The Council acts above and beyond the houses of parliament. So historically creating a new university has been something that’s not easy to do, especially when creating a new organization that is not from within the establishment..

Hilary: I can’t help but imagine men in wigs. Like Sir Isaac Newton. And I bet lots of  pomp and privilege goes with being a Privy counselor! Universities are so old in structure, culture and charter aren’t they. Not exactly today’s dream of nimble organization.

AnneW: The legislation was changed last year largely ironically to enable further neoliberal liberalisation. The rules were changed to allow more private providers to offer degrees. Though we were hardly what they had in mind, the new rules have been good for us because it means the rules are much more relaxed.

Hilary:  I see this paradox often. Deep conservatism that aligns with a libertarian creative destruction of what they see as too much regulation. This allows for new manifestations, some quite radically creative.

AnneW:What was born recently was the Co-operative University Working Group (CUWG). The members of the network are academic institutions similar to the Centre for Human Ecology, in that they are operating outside the mainstream. We’re meeting monthly to build a consensus for what we mean by a Co-operative University. We held a round table in May which enabled us to understand and outline what sort of governance structure we would want for a cooperative university. A cooperative university in essence will become a federation and network of member institutions with a very slim core function, other than providing services that are essential or that will be too expensive to deliver by individual institutions.

Hilary:  Do you see similarity with the Mondragon model?

AnneW: In some ways, it is similar. For us, the individual member institutions would be more of a self-organizing network.

Hilary:  My fingers are crossed for your success. That model is also how we envisage the AR+ Transformations community as a kind of federation. At least I hope there will be the continuity for those interested in following up after the Chalmers meeting. I want to come back to your reflections on the sustainable development goals. Who inspires you around issues of sustainability nowadays, especially as it links with a new way of educating?

AnneW: I’ve had the privilege to meet Valerie Jackman who is a lecturer at Edinburgh college and we are writing a book chapter together on cooperative education. And, as she will say herself, her life is dedicated to improving the lives of the young people that she has the privilege to mentor, to coach, to help with their learning. While she was a lecturer at college she was finding young people were signing up to courses but not knowing why they were signing up. Then dropping out because they didn’t know what they really wanted to do with their lives. She’s worked with these young people who helped design the course and some of them have helped build the assessment structures. This all falls under the Scottish qualification authorities, known as SVQ, Scottish Vocational Qualification. So, she has a new form of assessment.

Hilary: Sounds like key in that is developing of the self.

Anne W: And for the cooperative university we feel it’s really important because, we would like students in the future to commit to the institutions, the values of the institutions, whether it’s studying, or committing to the cooperative values and for Centre for Human Ecology especially committing to Centre for Human Ecology’s ecological values as well. And that’s more than just recognizing the values but that they actually commit to them and so build their own learning journeys with those values in mind.

Hilary: Encouraging participants to um, participate. Seeing oneself as a citizen, rather than always a consumer.

AnneW:  It’s about understanding themselves and how they want to move forward in the context of realizing the reality of the crises in society and the planet. And it is crucial they are supported in that process.

Hilary: What does transformative education look like that supports sustainability?

AnneW: I think the first part of that is building education for “responsible citizens”. I take the term “responsible citizens” directly from Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, which is the curriculum for primary and secondary school children in Scotland. In some ways the primary and secondary schools in Scotland are already taking steps towards this integrative form of education with the aim of creating”responsible citizens.”

AnneW:  But transformative education is where both students and staff are co-producing knowledge. The teacher becomes the facilitator of the learning process rather than the fountain of all knowledge. It means that the students will be actively involved in designing and deciding what each module of a course should focus on. It also means asking students to be reflective – in effect research their own learning process. For courses within Center for Human Ecology, there is always an element of reflecting on students’ worldview and how they are implicated and integrated with social and ecological crises. That means students need to develop empathy and act, even if the acting is only researching their own learning process. We see this as different from traditional forms of education which are all in the head – i.e., intellectual knowledge based. This work is rooted in the Scottish generalist tradition. Based on the work of Patrick Geddes and others. Education is yes about knowledge (the head), but also about empathy and compassion (the heart) and acting with agency and reflection to address the challenges presented by knowledge and feelings (the hand).

Hilary:  I feel that we’re talking along very similar lines, , in terms of the language I might use of liberating the ivory tower mentality and building new forms of education and educational opportunities. Though it often gets tougher before it gets easier.

AnneW:  The difficulty at the moment is complexity. It’s the scale of it. I recall with my PhD I mapped out what a sustainable community looked like and all the different aspects of it. And in all the things I do, I realized that if we’re going to transform society, we have to transform every single aspect of society synchronistically. Otherwise, if we don’t have the whole, one aspect wouldn’t work. So education is only one part of the whole.

Hilary: It feels as though we have  good alignment here. What would you need to come participate at the Gathering?

AnneW:  For me, it would need to be generative. I think that it’s very easy to say this, but to do it… I was at a conference a few days ago and all the things nice things were being said, but it was like attending a class that Paulo Freire would have criticized as the banking form of education.

Hilary:  I’d be so embarrassed if participants at our Gathering would have such an experience at the Chalmers gathering. May the heavens forfend!

AnneW:  It would also be really helpful to understand if there are other people already doing this form of cooperative education where the students are co producers and their ideas for how they can do it, and what’s actually financially viable as well. It’s about the critical analysis of justice, and considering everyone’s unique culture and the importance of this in relation to place and the injustices that people have to live with day by day

Hilary: Sensitivity to epistemic injustice, right. Meaning, there’s a certain model of education that is so dominant to the point where people can hardly conceive of any other or better way of doing education. You were calling it elitist, I would call it more of an expert model. It’s oppressive, and it’s damn hard to tackle. It’s well rewarded – think of the Privy Council.

AnneW:  Historically highland rural people were Gaelic speaking and so were repressed. There’s probably many similarities to Ireland. In Scotland people were seen at the time of 19th century as being savages, second-class citizens, so very similar I suppose to Latin American indigenous people. This trauma has created a legacy in Scottish culture and it tends to be one of learnt helplessness. This helplessness is also perpetuated by cultural power dynamics where rural folk can be assumed to be uneducated.

Hilary: It’s a tough nut to crack. Education itself helps reproduce unsustainability and injustice. Yet we rarely tackle that as an issue.

Anne: The young people today, the education they are having, is putting a lot of stress on students, creating mental health issues. That just shows that something’s drastically wrong where we’re not giving the time and the space to build their own personal awareness so that they can explore what is important to them and build their lives around it.

Hilary: This feels related to the “heart” part of our work?

Anne: I’ve read Ronald Barnett’s Ecological University where he beautifully illustrates that. He aligns what he calls the ecological approach with sustainable development. He does a really in-depth description or analysis of sustainable development versus human ecology. Similarly, I’ve realized this through my own experience, from moving from sustainable development to the Centre for Human Ecology. It’s what we’ve been talking about through this whole conversation about agency versus sustainable development. Sustainable development is in the head and it doesn’t always engage the heart and the hand and have agency. Sustainable development is not transformative. Ronald describes sustainable development as being in the world. Whereas actually his ecological view is that development and education should be from the world and for the world.

Hilary:  We need a new narrative around sustainable development. It would help if it were more feminine. It appears to be becoming something that may well re-emerge in the 21st century. I say re-emerge as I do think humanity was quite sustainable till we developed technology whose unintended consequences are mind-blowing. There is a sense that massive transition is necessary. And many people are doing their part of it, in different ways and, and bringing in different philosophies. If I were simple about it, I’d say it’s basically holistic thinking and acting. We’re kind of feeling our way out of the unsustainable mess.

Anne Finding that common ground is good. I think there’s an unnamed part there too and it ties in with the metaphysical. Recognizing there is a metaphysical aspect; this is really important.

Hilary:  Perhaps something about the rise of the feminine leading forward with a respect for our integration which includes elements of spirituality, or ethics, inter-dependence. I’m hopeful! It’s been so lovely to meet you.

AnneW:  Lovely. And enjoy your day. Thank you so much. Bye Bye.