The seed pod : facilitating self organizing robust settlement patterns in developing countries

Darwin's theory of natural selection defines a conscious process of self organisation in which traits become more or less common in such a way that an organism is able to survive and flourish in a particular environment. Rapid growth in the last fifty years made possible by more and more efficient ways of harvesting resource has created rapid environmental change. Intricately balanced ecologies that have taken millions of years to evolve are suffering from unravelling diversity. It is essential that ballooning populations around the world develop systems in which individual settlements positively affect surrounding ecologies. The effect of sick ecologies and drained resources are most harshly felt by the poor in developing countries. The situation boils down to provision of an element which firstly provides the vital requirements for survival while positively affecting the ecologies of which it is a part; secondly allows settlements to adapt over time according to the traits of users in an environment rather than those of a hierarchical disconnected third party and thirdly insures that survival does not depend on having lots of children. The seed pod aims to grow a localized ecology which allows urbanisation for the poor in developing countries to follow self organizing settlement patterns. Goals: Healthy living becomes possible in the local ecology without employment (unemployment is a reality) Financial resources are freed up for facilities such as schools Social support networks strengthen Minimization of strain on resources allows diversity to flourish Construction of instant communities is replaced by a robust self organizing process of development with the capacity to adapt to rapidly changing conditions The seeds are sown and the settlement grows organically from each unique social and ecological environment Empowerment, self reliance and local skills are generated A community lease and a community-managed register of rights holders with the potential for upgrade to individual ownership provides people the opportunity for long term investment in a great living environment. Resolution at a micro scale is likely to result in more conflict then provision of large scale identically defined units. If systems are put in place to help resolve conflict, however, the process would be tangibly more democratic. The seed pod goes hand in hand with a system for conflict resolution illustrated by the phased growth of Green Park an informal settlement in Driftsands Nature Reserve and by notionally suggesting the integration of the education system into the community through a transition of safe, contained learning spaces and permeable public spaces

Teaching and Professional Fellowship Report 2007-2008 : Make the Numbers Count, Improving students' learning experiences through an analysis of Library and Learning Resources data

Feedback on Library and Learning Resources (LLR) services and support at the University of the Arts London (UAL) is received from a very extensive range of sources. However, although a considerable quantity of information is available for analysis, it remains very difficult for LLR staff to extract meaningful data from these numerous sources, which can reveal, in depth, the true, individual student experience of LLR services. LLR is aware that there is a lot that is not known, or is not being asked of our students, about their individual experience, which could prove extremely helpful for effective decision-making and service design and delivery. In particular, LLR is interested in identifying and resolving issues of access and support for students currently studying at UAL who are from under represented groups in higher education. Make the numbers counts has enabled the Fellowship Team to move beyond looking at usage figures, gate counts, numbers of issue and renewal transactions, borrower numbers and percentage satisfaction levels, and to extend and add to our knowledge-base of what students at UAL really think and feel about academic libraries. It has enabled us to explore how individual students make use of the services and support provided by LLR. The qualitative data collected through this project has been compared to existing sources of information and to staff experience and understanding of the issues raised, to see if the findings of our research challenge or correlate with other evidence which relates to LLR use and non-use. The focus of the Fellowship has been to explore the particular experience of students who are the first in their family to go to university and who are currently studying at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon (CCW) and the London College of Communication. Research has shown that this group of students is important amongst the range of students who are now entering higher education through the expansion of participation in university and tertiary-level study. Talking to first generation students was a key element of the project and the greatest source of learning for the Project Team

Urban landscape, urban regeneration. Interdisciplinary academic class in Tokyo

In 2021 at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Design of Hosei University in Tokyo started an international and interdisciplinary academic program aimed to analyze the urban landscape in Japan in relationship with the need to valorize its historical paradigms. with: Tsuneaki FUKUI, Mayu WATANABE, Kohei AIZAWA, Sota NAKAMURA, Yoshito HORIKOSHI, Hotaka MIKI, Manami MORITO, Kohei FUKUI, Rio YAMADA, Yuiko SAKAI

Unsettling Times: land, political economy and protest in the Bedouin villages of central Jordan

This thesis is a study of discourses of contemporary Bedouin identity and political economy in central Jordan. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows the experiences of young, mostly male, interlocutors living in small villages around the town of Madaba, from two largely settled but still discursively Bedouin ‘ashā’ir (socio-political categories normally glossed in English as ‘tribes’); the Bani Sakhr and the Bani Hamida. I explore the ways in which these interlocutors imagine and anticipate their futures, considering the dilemmas they face in seeking meaningful social reproduction, and their entanglement with various modes of everyday politics, in order to understand how and why political forms and identity categories are adapted and reproduced, especially in the context of new rural protest movements. This provides a new approach to wider processes of nation-building, identity-formation, and state encompassment of marginal areas, in the face of mass forced migration, structural adjustment, the rise of new social forums (on- and off-line), and widespread protests. It considers questions of land settlement, sovereignty and the politics of everyday life in a rural region from which the protest movement dubbed Jordan's 'Arab Spring' emerged among supposedly traditionalist and loyalist Bedouin. I examine the historical context behind the current social, political and economic position of my interlocutors via histories of land settlement, sedenterisation initiatives, and changing political institutions through Ottoman rule and the British Mandate, examining various processes of frontier governmentality that sought to pacify and settle, but also define and repurpose Bedouin as a conceptual category. Making an intervention in the long-standing anthropological debate around the nature and analytical usage of tribalism and the role of colonial effect in its construction in the region, I consider ‘asha’īr as political modalities existing in a relationship of co-(re)production with the nation-state, within a political and moral economy of hospitality, protection and encompassment, which has also come to be used to symbolise the nation of Jordan itself. In the face of postcolonial critiques and challenges over representation and Orientalism, anthropologists have rightly called for greater reflexivity and attention to positionality. Yet, more problematically, they have largely withdrawn from examinations of non-state political forms and non-national identity categories. Concepts of Bedouin and tribe, aside from their contested and critiqued construction, continue to have conceptual and political power in Jordan and elsewhere, and anthropology is at risk of leaving them to development practitioners and policy-makers. Anthropologists might formerly have explained the social setting I study as one generated by agnatic kinship and segmentary lineage. I instead reconsider ‘ashā’ir as historically contingent political responses centred on certain limited projects of representational sovereignty.Cambridge Trust, Fitzwilliam College, Trinity College, CBRL

Ar lorg na slí

This thesis explores the possibilities of narrative approaches for adult educator growth. It is written and presented as a conversational walking tour between myself and a dialogic other through landscapes of personal, conceptual and occupational significance. This creative confluence of writing and walking is not merely a device to enhance reader engagement, but, after Richardson (1994); Speedy (2005); Gale & Wyatt (2006); Hall (2009); Ingold (2010); Shepherd (2011); McCormack (2013); and Gros (2014) is used here as a method of inquiry. Furthermore, these processes of embodied and contextualised dialogic practice perform a pedagogic function (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1997; Connolly & Hussey, 2013) which suggests our walking and talking tour can be seen as a research and learning text. Interpretive (Denzin, 2014) and polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1984) fragments from a fictional tutor anthology of educational and occupational biographies are interspersed with four creative, autoethnographically-infused walks which take place over the four parts of the text. Part One (Ways in) commences with tutor stories of their ways in to adult education before our first walk takes take us to Belfast to explore the theoretical ways in of this inquiry. On this walk we talk our way through the intersection between poststructuralist and postcolonial theories (Barthes, 1977; Kristeva, 1986a; Cixous, 1976; Bhabha,1994; Said, 1995) and cultural practice (Joyce, 1968, 1992a, 1992b; Morrison, 1992; Gilman, 1993; Duffy, 1994; Heaney, 1998; Welch, 2001) which reveals, for this inquiry at least, the significance of the discursive subject. In Part Two (Values, Struggle and Growth) fragments from tutor narratives on values, struggles and growth are interspersed with our walk through the western suburban and industrial landscapes of Edinburgh. It is here that we start to see the emergence of the educator subject and bear witness to an ever-emerging adult educator knowledge and practice (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1996; Brookfield, 2005; Connolly, 2013). Our third walk, Part Three (A Clearing), considers the possibilities of the convergence of the cultural and educational concepts and practices, which the first two walks have rehearsed, in a methodological space which is ethically and epistemologically consistent with our endeavours to explore adult educator experience (St. Pierre, 1997; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Ryan, 2001). Our final, culturally-cautious (Enright, 2015) walk in Part Four (Paths travelled; paths ahead) takes place in an autobiographically-resonant, unmapped valley in the west of Ireland. As well as reflecting on the worth and the significance of this inquiry, personally, methodologically and for adult educators, the inquiry subjects consider occupational futures in education and care within a broader socio-cultural backdrop of precarious and, often, invisible work. At one level this inquiry produces a troubled text – a messy product, or maybe, more accurately, a draft, of a theoretical, methodological and pedagogic practice which reveals itself from the slow process of the inquiry itself. And what does emerge, eventually, is, a ‘writerly text’ (Barthes, 1992), a textual something that sets the reader to work in the creative, playful, critical and perambulatory performance of knowledge and practice of a dialogic and intertextual adult educator subject in hard times: times of occupational and contractual precarity (Sennett, 1998; Standing, 2011; Courtois & O’Keefe, 2015) and times of significant structural, ideological and discursive shifts in adult education in Ireland and further afield (Connolly, 2013; Murray, et al., 2014). The journey comes to a pause in the end in, quite possibly, a post-qualitative space (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013; 2014), which resists demarcations between research, personal and professional development and creative acts. And in this space there may just be some hope for adult educators struggling to exist and to grow in these hard times of educator precarity and professional invisibility – a hope that lurks around critical and creative acts of narrative reflexivity which draw from triskelion flows of personal, theoretical and communal epistemologies to produce more plural, polyphonic and politicised texts - texts which unashamedly sing the fractured and unstable occupational ontologies in their very form and style

Ar lorg na slí

This thesis explores the possibilities of narrative approaches for adult educator growth. It is written and presented as a conversational walking tour between myself and a dialogic other through landscapes of personal, conceptual and occupational significance. This creative confluence of writing and walking is not merely a device to enhance reader engagement, but, after Richardson (1994); Speedy (2005); Gale & Wyatt (2006); Hall (2009); Ingold (2010); Shepherd (2011); McCormack (2013); and Gros (2014) is used here as a method of inquiry. Furthermore, these processes of embodied and contextualised dialogic practice perform a pedagogic function (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1997; Connolly & Hussey, 2013) which suggests our walking and talking tour can be seen as a research and learning text. Interpretive (Denzin, 2014) and polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1984) fragments from a fictional tutor anthology of educational and occupational biographies are interspersed with four creative, autoethnographically-infused walks which take place over the four parts of the text. Part One (Ways in) commences with tutor stories of their ways in to adult education before our first walk takes take us to Belfast to explore the theoretical ways in of this inquiry. On this walk we talk our way through the intersection between poststructuralist and postcolonial theories (Barthes, 1977; Kristeva, 1986a; Cixous, 1976; Bhabha,1994; Said, 1995) and cultural practice (Joyce, 1968, 1992a, 1992b; Morrison, 1992; Gilman, 1993; Duffy, 1994; Heaney, 1998; Welch, 2001) which reveals, for this inquiry at least, the significance of the discursive subject. In Part Two (Values, Struggle and Growth) fragments from tutor narratives on values, struggles and growth are interspersed with our walk through the western suburban and industrial landscapes of Edinburgh. It is here that we start to see the emergence of the educator subject and bear witness to an ever-emerging adult educator knowledge and practice (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1996; Brookfield, 2005; Connolly, 2013). Our third walk, Part Three (A Clearing), considers the possibilities of the convergence of the cultural and educational concepts and practices, which the first two walks have rehearsed, in a methodological space which is ethically and epistemologically consistent with our endeavours to explore adult educator experience (St. Pierre, 1997; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Ryan, 2001). Our final, culturally-cautious (Enright, 2015) walk in Part Four (Paths travelled; paths ahead) takes place in an autobiographically-resonant, unmapped valley in the west of Ireland. As well as reflecting on the worth and the significance of this inquiry, personally, methodologically and for adult educators, the inquiry subjects consider occupational futures in education and care within a broader socio-cultural backdrop of precarious and, often, invisible work. At one level this inquiry produces a troubled text – a messy product, or maybe, more accurately, a draft, of a theoretical, methodological and pedagogic practice which reveals itself from the slow process of the inquiry itself. And what does emerge, eventually, is, a ‘writerly text’ (Barthes, 1992), a textual something that sets the reader to work in the creative, playful, critical and perambulatory performance of knowledge and practice of a dialogic and intertextual adult educator subject in hard times: times of occupational and contractual precarity (Sennett, 1998; Standing, 2011; Courtois & O’Keefe, 2015) and times of significant structural, ideological and discursive shifts in adult education in Ireland and further afield (Connolly, 2013; Murray, et al., 2014). The journey comes to a pause in the end in, quite possibly, a post-qualitative space (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013; 2014), which resists demarcations between research, personal and professional development and creative acts. And in this space there may just be some hope for adult educators struggling to exist and to grow in these hard times of educator precarity and professional invisibility – a hope that lurks around critical and creative acts of narrative reflexivity which draw from triskelion flows of personal, theoretical and communal epistemologies to produce more plural, polyphonic and politicised texts - texts which unashamedly sing the fractured and unstable occupational ontologies in their very form and style

AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse