| ETRD Award
Jan Visser Wins ETRD Award February, 2000 by Professor Nick Eastmond, Ph.D. Q1:What two to three key experiences in your background led you to develop your current theory? Learning Without Frontiers, or the idea of caring for the integrity, completeness and comprehensiveness of the learning environment, is not a theory. I would rather call it a vision. It’s a vision based on the consideration that learning is something every human being has a right to engage in at any time in his or her life. It is also based on the notion that there is an intimate relationship between learning, change, and growth and that therefore learning is a prime condition for human and social development. Obviously, that vision is underpinned by many things we know, some of which are embedded in larger theoretical frameworks. We know, for instance, that learning is not the privilege of the young, but that everybody, at any age, can learn. We also know, thanks to the development of the instructional design field, what to do when we want people to accomplish particular learning tasks. We don’t know very well yet, though, how to handle the larger question of creating the overall societal conditions that best allow people to take charge of their own learning the way they like to do it. Right as we are talking, I am greatly concerned with and appalled by the case of a guy in Mozambique who, because of the conditions that prevailed in his country at the time he should have finished secondary school, could not do so. He was in senior secondary school at the time the country became independent from Portugal. Following independence, most Portuguese teachers decided to leave the country. It became virtually impossible to run the school system. Thus, the new government decided to suspend the two upper grades of secondary education. Portugal having done little to create the human resource base necessary to run Mozambique independently, young Mozambicans, trained or untrained, were called upon to take over the role of the departing Portuguese cadres. The person I am talking about, who involuntarily could not complete his secondary education, became director of a school in one of the Northern provinces of Mozambique. I met him later, when he was transferred back to the capital city Maputo where, at the time (early nineteen eighties), we were setting up Mozambique’s first post-independence distance education system, to which I was the principal adviser. He became part of the team of people involved. This was the time the country was in deep trouble because of an evolving civil war, but I've always been impressed by the tough dedication of my Mozambican colleagues. Work went on even in the hardest of circumstances. Conditions have improved since and the man I am talking about has now established a flourishing practice as independent consultant, working both nationally and internationally. How has he learned his trade? Well, simply by doing. But society expects more than just competence. It also wants to see it certified and documented. So, he enrolled in the external degree program of the University of London and is about to complete a Master’s Degree. He even wants to go on and has applied for admission into the Ph.D. program in instructional design at a renowned State University in the US. In preparation for it he did his GRE and TOEFL, passing both with very good results. Yet, the answer he just got back from the admissions office states that, as things stand, he cannot be admitted. We accept a master's degree from the U.K. only if admission to that master's program required the completion of a bachelor's degree. He doesn’t have it and he does not have a secondary school diploma either. The University of London’s external degree program has an open admission policy, valuing process and output rather than input. The above case is that of one person. Unfortunately, the case doesn’t stand on its own. Fortunately, the person of my example is unlikely to give up easily and may eventually be successful in turning the bureaucratic system around. But the case shows the tremendous barriers that are often put in the way of individuals who aspire to learn. My other case is a generic one. There are some 900 million illiterate people in this world. They, like anyone else, have a desire to learn. However, we keep telling them that they can only do so if they first become literate. I’m not saying that it is not a noble goal to make people literate. Of course it is. But it is not noble to ignore that exceptional feats of learning take place among the illiterate. I met hordes of them during my 25 years of development work in Africa. There is a lot you can learn from them. We, who master the alphanumeric symbol system, can learn a lot from people who are conversant with totally different symbol systems. They can also learn from us. But there are artificial barriers between us and them that prevent such learning from taking place. While directing the Learning Without Frontiers effort in UNESCO, one of my colleagues in Central America, Juan Chong, an exceptionally enterprising and creative person who collaborated with us, showed that it is possible to develop learning packages to help illiterate people learn the things they want to learn without making them literate first. It’s not hard at all. It just requires a bit of vision and the willingness to row against the stream. When my father asked my mother if she would marry him, she said no. My father was a sailor at the time and she didn’t want to marry a sailor. So, my father decided he would change course and go to university. He hadn’t gone to secondary school, though, so he first had to take evening classes to get his secondary school diploma. Then he entered university. Combining study and work, he completed everything according to the book. As a child, I had the permanent example of someone who was always learning. When we, the kids, were meanwhile in secondary school and studied subjects, such as the French language, my mother had never studied, she decided to take French classes. These are examples that showed me at an early age that learning is something you just do. You don’t wait till someone tells you. I would probably not have been who I am and I would not have valued learning the way I value it now, had I not had such examples. I might not have envisioned Learning Without Frontiers the way I do, had it not been for the kind of experiences I just mentioned. Q2: How have you been involved with UNESCO in developing it? My involvement with UNESCO in developing Learning Without Frontiers was, in a sense, accidental. I had been working with UNESCO for four years, directing its various operations in Southern Africa, heading up the subregional office in Harare, Zimbabwe. At the end of 1993, I was transferred to Headquarters in Paris, France, to become director of an environmental education program. Because of a couple of internal hiccups in the Organization, this did not materialize. Meanwhile, an initiative had been suggested by an ad hoc advisory committee to create a program with the name Learning Without Frontiers. Little detail was contained in the advice given, but I happen, at one time, somewhere in the middle of 1994, to have been asked by the Director-General to take part in a meeting on the initiative, which he chaired. I made some critical noises, which I thought would have made this my last meeting on this subject. The opposite happened. I was charged with the development of the program and later given the task to direct it. 3. What led to your collaboration with David Berg? Learning Without Frontiers started against all odds. A program of this kind didn’t fit very well in the mainstream of UNESCO’s work. So, we had little support, financially and in terms of human resources. Besides, few people inside UNESCO had the kind of profile that would qualify them for an innovative effort such as Learning Without Frontiers. I thus had to look outside UNESCO and bring in people with external financing who would have the right profile. David was one of them. He had been working for a number of years in the Middle East for the World Health Organization when we first met. There were more people on our team, which was made up of different nationalities. We all worked very well together and we all worked very hard. We had a great time together. Most of us continue to collaborate beyond our UNESCO existence. Q4: What events have transpired since you wrote the article? How would those affect your present position on these matters? The most visible event is perhaps that I have since left UNESCO and that, of the old team, many of its members have since gone out into the world as well, some within the UNESCO context, others outside of it. All of us continue to work on the Learning Without Frontiers vision, making it a reality in different settings. The fact that we dissolved ourselves should be seen as a natural consequence of how we were motivating each other. None of us saw Learning Without Frontiers as I yet another UNESCO program, a something that should stay in UNESCO or have a clear UNESCO label. In fact, I decided early on that 'Learning Without Frontiers' would be a non-proprietary concept. We, the Learning Without Frontiers team members, were all very much aware that you can effectively work on such a program within an organization like UNESCO only as long as the conditions are there. We knew that would be the case for a couple of years, but not necessarily much longer. So, we had deliberately given ourselves a timeframe of four years to put the dynamics of the program in place. That was all we wanted and I think we have done so successfully. We have had more influence with our ideas outside UNESCO than inside UNESCO, but I don’t see that as a problem. UNESCO deserves credit to have allowed us to work on some pretty impossible things. My own work is now focusing on developing the
Learning Development
Q5: What trends do you see on the horizon that our international readers should be aware of? I think the whole learning equation is now presenting itself in an entirely different perspective. Few people who are in their right state of mind would still consider the school system as the only, or even major, response to society’s learning needs. There is growing awareness that the learning environment must be conceived of as something enormously more complex and that the different components of the learning environment - the school; the family; the street; the media; the workplace; libraries; museums; the Internet; etc. - are all organically interdependent. The problem we are facing is that ideas develop faster than practice can change. That will be cause for some tension. But it is a necessary tension. Without it there will be no progress. And time is running out. The problems of today’s world are enormous. They can only be solved with the involvement of all. But we can’t solve problems if we don’t learn. That’s why. Q6: What additional thoughts would you like to add? I think there is a great need now for collaboration and for learning together. Thanks to the new ways in which we communicate with each other, travel around the globe, and are aware of each other’s existence, the world has, perceptually, become much smaller. At the same time, ever more people inhabit this tiny planet and the processes of interaction they create become ever more complex. The time that it was possible to govern nations and the world in a centralized manner has gone for good. More than 50 years ago, an organization like UNESCO could still be thought of as the single most important agency for international development in its particular fields of competence. If the same attitude prevailed today, not only as regards UNESCO, but any such organization, it would be disastrous. Now, the best any such organization can do is in the first place to visualize itself as a learning organization. In the second place, while adopting an organizational learning behavior, it should look around for others who are similarly interested in the processes that pertain to its own mandate. Having identified such opportunities, you then have to focus on mechanisms to work together and support each other’s work. Networking is the name of the game. Its implications are not just organizational. It’s in the first place a matter of attitudes. In Learning Without Frontiers we were particularly focusing on these connections. Q7: What questions would you ask of our readers? What challenge(s) would you like to pass along to them? In the spirit of what I just said about working and learning together, it is appropriate to raise the issue of solidarity. We live in a world of incredible discrepancies in opportunities to learn and with a great diversity of barriers that hamper or block people from taking advantage of such opportunities. It requires the involvement of many to realize a vision such as Learning Without Frontiers. The challenge to redefine the learning landscape is still very new. It is best undertaken simultaneously on multiple fronts rather than by trying to work incrementally. I see it as a particular challenge for the International Council to generate such solidarity and the spirit to cooperate across geo-political boundaries among AECT’s membership (not just those who identify with the International Council, but AECT at large). Obviously, I’ll be happy to interact with readers of the newsletter who want to face the challenge. I can be reached at jvisser@learndev.org. Jan Visser, Ph.D.
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