Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460-476)
Thursday 22 May 2003
PROFESSOR ANDY
BLOWERS AND
DR STEPHEN
HINCHLIFFE
Q460 Mr Challen: Is there any way
that you are able to pass on the lessons of how you teach this
course to other people with interests relating to ESD, be they
government or academia or elsewhere?
Dr Hinchliffe: In what sense?
Do you mean other than through the recruitment to the course?
Q461 Mr Challen: The OU is always
groundbreaking. As a former OU student many years ago, I was very
impressed by the groundbreaking nature of it. You have to be innovative
in order to teach from a distance. I am sure that other institutions,
particularly in academia, or in governments, could learn from
your experience, particularly in education for sustainable development.
Have you thought that it might be possible to pass on the lessons
from your experience? I know it is early days.
Professor Blowers: I think it
is quite difficult. In one sense, we are like exhausted volcanoes;
we have spent four years working on this. Once you have delivered
a course, that, in a sense, does not end it, but you do pass on
to other things. One of the problems is perhaps not often delivering
that experience. That is the thought I would like you to take
away. Although this course will have influence in many other institutions—and,
after all, the books are sold off the shelf, so it is not that
it is inaccessible—the experience that our students are
going through is quite important. We will have a big review at
the end of this first year to see how the course has gone. It
is updated, and, like the environment, it is constantly changing,
but we will be building on it as the years go on. I often think
that perhaps these Open University experiences that are quite
unique do not perhaps get the overall purchase or diffusion that
they deserve—and that is something we ought to work at.
One would welcome perhaps a comment in your report on these courses.
Q462 Mr Challen: Do other people
express interest in how you evaluate these courses? Do they come
along and ask you how you manage to do something?
Dr Hinchliffe: There is a sort
of informal network because it was not just written by OU academics;
there were other people—including Jaquie over there, who
actually contributed to the course, and came to a few meetings
when their work was being discussed and so on. Presumably, that
then feeds back into other institutions. We talked of colleagues
in other universities. We are in that network and talking in that
way. I guess the issue is the formal way in which we could disseminate
our practices.
Professor Blowers: There are two
things: one is the intellectual side—that is, what we build.
We built something that was quite important through this inter-disciplinary
process that we have discussed. There is also the question of
how we teach it, which we have not said very much about. The ways
and means whereby we teach, in terms of setting up clear aims,
learning objectives, relating them to the assessment strategies
and having individual projects and utilising the full range of
multimedia, are different experiences. There is a different experience
in reading a book, which is fundamentally different to listening
to an audio cassette. All of those experiences are quite important
taken together. They perhaps permit us to teach environmental
issues in a way you cannot just do through one medium. That experience
is something we perhaps should build on or at least consolidate
and try and diffuse a bit.
Q463 Mr Challen: I understand that
you are both geographers. It seems to me that we have quite a
number of geographers in the vanguard of environment and education
for sustainable development. Do you think it is something that
academics are not that interested in; or not as interested as
you are?
Professor Blowers: I sometimes
call myself an environmental politics and policy expert! I do
not think it is so true necessarily. I think sociologists and
political scientists also are interested and do have sub-specialisms
in the environmental fields in their subjects.
Dr Hinchliffe: We are not in a
very good position to talk about this in the OU because it is
called the Human Geography Department, but the main thing about
most geography departments is that you have in the same building
physical and human geographers, which means that you are faced,
day-to-day, with that notion of engaging with both the social
side, which is vastly important, but also engaging with the world
around us and studying the processes and so on. I suppose that
geographers are used to having those conversations, fraught though
they may be. That has allowed us to go out. I think there is plenty
of interest in our university, (and that is why we were able to
do this course in technology, sciences, social sciences—and
to a lesser extent arts in our university), but certainly in other
universities. Geography has been the home for this course for
a number of years, partly because we are able to chair those kinds
of discussions and slightly used to that kind of tension, whereas
others might turn their backs on it a little bit.
Q464 Mr Challen: What kind of teaching
challenges are there in this rather over-arching subject of ESD?
Dr Hinchliffe: The main one is
to get students into things in ways that are not too compartmentalised
from the start but nonetheless teach basic skills. That has been
our real difficulty. We have cracked that partly. The whole course
is very much case-study led. For example, radioactive waste management
becomes a big issue in terms of thinking about the future. We
lead off a number of times with that. The whole course starts
on an estuary in Essex, to get people feeling that a number of
issues come into one place at one time—bird migrations to
managed retreat, to farming or whatever. We lead with three chapters
in book 1, centred on biodiversity and extinction, as a way to
get the biologists to talk about what is going on. The philosophers
talk about why we should or should not be bothered if something
becomes extinct. The more technological side talks about risk
and uncertainty. We try and keep the same focus and come at it
from different angles. The real challenge is that there is a risk
with that strategy that students miss out on the basic building
blocks. They sometimes come to university education without some
kind of foundational science or foundational social science, or
whatever. Some students struggle, depending on their different
routes into the course, and that is a real difficulty, to get
that over.
Professor Blowers: But they can
move on to these things. It is not stand-alone in itself. The
biggest challenge when we started this four years ago was what
we should teach. If you are just given a course to construct which
says "environment" it has in a sense no precedents.
It is not like trying to teach certain aspects of mathematics
or chemistry or whatever; you literally do have to invent a strategy
and a means of teaching it. That was the big challenge. I think
we confronted that and succeeded. Of course, we would now say
that it now looks as though it is the only way you can do it.
That is one of the problems. I am sure there are other ways of
doing this, but we have found a way that we think is working,
and that is quite important. You do not know any of these things,
and it was a struggle in the dark to start with—just setting
things up, getting languages going and getting ideas moving, and
beginning to work out how we could teach it and how we could think
about these things. We used these concepts to try to do that.
Dr Hinchliffe: The principle has
always been to inspire first and then give them a need to know,
so that we set up a problem, and then say that in order to address
the problem of genetic modification and crop field trials, they
need to understand some of the science; and then they go off on
a need-to-know basis. We are hoping that that inspiration will
then lead those who are really interested to go to do a genetics
course. We see ourselves in the role of setting the inspiration
going; and then they can find out more if they want to. There
are risks, though with that.
Q465 Mr Challen: What exactly is
the skills gap that you have identified that has led to the creation
of this course?
Dr Hinchliffe: The ability to
bring a lot of things together at once; the ability to understand
the social complexities as well as the scientific, physical complexities
of any problem, like climate change. You cannot solve a problem
like that by simply looking at the science or simply looking at
the social science. That is the gap. There is a deficit, however,
before you get there generally in education: it is the lack of
scientific and social scientific literacy before people get to
the university.
Professor Blowers: We are trying
to get people to understand how you make sense of things. A lot
of courses, including our predecessor course, are basically content
led. You can teach people an awful lot about the environment or
a whole set of subjects about it, and you almost leave them after
that. In a sense, they have not got transferable skills to take
it forward. We have been at pains to ensure that people can do
that. You will see, if you are interested in the way we have set
this out, but essentially you want to get people to engage with
issues, partly because they are motivated and interested; and
then to be able, through the vehicle of this course, to apply
what they have done to the world in which they live. I think that
is an extremely important thing to try and achieve and it is quite
difficult; but I would say that we have gone some way towards
that. That is quite different from the kind of teaching of this
subject overall heretofore.
Q466 Mr Challen: You clearly need
a grounding in science to be able to tackle this course. Perhaps
you do not agree with that, but it seems to me from what you have
described that that is the case. For those people that do not
have a grounding in science but want to be involved in this field,
how have they been able to approach this subject?
Dr Hinchliffe: At the OU we have
things called First Level Courses, which used to be called Foundation
Courses—and we got rid of that language, just as that language
came back in! You can do this course as your first course at the
OU, having done nothing at all. It is literally open access. It
has been a real challenge in delivering it in that sense. We assume
some scientific literacy but not an awful lot, it must be said.
We have at the OU a number of resources, particularly on the Web
now, and, for example The Good Science Guide which is a
generic resource for OU courses. We advise those students who
are really struggling that when they are doing their assignments
they should get The Good Science Guide from their regional
centre, or access material on the Web increasingly, to help them
with those basic skills. It is getting the students to do that
which is the problem, and to get them to know that they have to
do that. The scientists who do this course may struggle with some
of the social ideas and the arts ideas, or whatever, and the kind
of literatures you need to think in those ways. We have tried
to not be exclusive or exclude anyone from the course; but, as
I said, in terms of getting the assignments back, we have not
necessarily got that absolutely right. I think it is very difficult
to get it absolutely right for everyone, given the OU has an open
access ethos behind it.
Q467 Mr Challen: What sort of students
have you attracted so far? Have they mainly been from a scientific
background?
Dr Hinchliffe: As far as I know—and
I am speaking slightly off the record because I will have to check
the stats—it is normally a third social science, a third
more technical subjects, and a third sciences. That obviously
adds up to one! But then there are a number of people who are
starting straight away, and some people have come from the arts
side, which are more of a minority. In terms of my own group,
that mix is about right.
Q468 Mr Challen: Are they predisposed
towards environmental change or positive action in the environment,
or do they come out of curiosity?
Dr Hinchliffe: A mixture. Some
are doing jobs where they feel getting a course like this behind
them, or a series of courses at the OU, will help them in their
career, especially those working in councils or in businesses
where they want to get some sort of environmental management qualification.
Others—retirees or whatever—where they are interested
in current affairs and so on.
Q469 Mr Challen: Is the course recognised
by any professional bodies as yet?
Professor Blowers: Can we take
notice of that question? In the past, these courses have been
recognised by the Royal Thames Valley Institute. I think that
scheme still persists. There may be some in the science and technology
area. I do not know, is the direct answer to the question. Certainly,
successor courses, as part of the environmental sciences or social
sciences programmes could be.
Q470 Mr Challen: Could people use
this course building in to other university courses? Sometimes
you can transfer—
Professor Blowers: The only problem
with that is that this course is a sixty-point course; i.e., it
is a sixth of an undergraduate degree, so it is a big chunk. The
way we have built it—I personally would not want to see
it disaggregated. The very nature of what we are trying to do
means that it is integrated, and you should think through that
whole experience. I certainly think a number of other universities
would be pretty wise to have a look at what we have done. We do
have credit transfers and so on; there are transfers between universities
in terms of various modules so that that is possible. I do not
know quite how they nestle because the requirements of different
institutions are quite different. Their modules are generally
shorter than ours for example. From what we have said, I hope
you have got the message that we think that as things stand at
this moment, in 2003, this is probably the best there is, in terms
of a foundational level inter-disciplinary approach towards understanding
the environment.
Q471 Mr Ainsworth: Very briefly,
following on from that, you have alluded to some structural differences
between the OU and other universities, and you have just mentioned
the courses and so on. I am curious about why, given the importance
of this subject, which you clearly recognise, and the popularity
of the course that you are running, other universities have not
gone for it. Is there more than structure at play here? Is there
an attitude problem amongst other universities and academics?
Professor Blowers: I think this
question obviously needs to be directed at other universities.
Q472 Mr Ainsworth: I am asking your
opinion.
Professor Blowers: No, no, I have
been so long out that I do not know what is going on elsewhere.
I know that one of your advisors will quickly put you wise on
this. I just think that partly it goes back to the problem that
I entertained earlier: usually, many universities are not set
up for this kind of experience in terms of teaching. You tend,
on the whole, still to teach your own flock; but we are not messiahs
with our own flock; we are a course team. We are collaborating
collectively to produce a particular course, and therefore we
write together and we try and think together. It is a strange
way of doing things in some ways, but it is bound to produce something
different, which I think is extremely difficult to produce elsewhere.
After all, we are putting huge up-front resources into this. Very
few places would have the luxury of putting 18 academics together
for four years more or less full-time to do this. That is the
way the Open University is constructed because of its big output
in terms of numbers of students. In that sense, we have to be
good because we have got the opportunity, which I do not think
occurs elsewhere. That is not to say that there are not magnificent
courses elsewhere—and in my judgment there are, particularly
in some of the fields relating to ours, but which are perhaps
a little bit more specialised. There may well be introductory
type courses of this type, but I certainly do not think they would
have the quality that this would have because it would be too
difficult to do.
Dr Hinchliffe: I think we can
overstate the differences sometimes. There are a lot of academics
who would love to be involved in this kind of endeavour. I did
it at Keele University on an inter-disciplinary environmental
management course. It is difficult to reproduce the intensity
of what we have got at the OU just because of the structural differences.
We do not have students on a day-to-day basis at the OU which
allows us to sit in a meeting all day, which is very difficult
to do for other academics. I think the structure difference is
the key; I do not think it is the willingness because I think
a lot of people are very willing to be in this kind of endeavour
and who are interested in the kinds of things we have done—and
we are also interested in what they have done.
Q473 Chairman: I am going to have
to bring this session to a close, but there is one issue that
I should like to explore in a little more detail, and it concerns
the situation at the Open University with respect to the academics
that you have there. Do you feel that amongst them—and talking
now just about the Open University—that all academics cross-curricular
share this zeal that you have for sustainable development; or
is there a sense that it is something that government expects
people, from whatever walk of life, to take on; but it is not
really shared by academics right across the board? What is your
sense of that?
Professor Blowers: A good question.
We have obviously come across as zealots, but perhaps after four
years we are getting tired! I think it is in the nature of the
way the Open University works that when it sets up course teams,
they are enthusiastic about that particular thing. We are not
consciously teaching sustainable development, by the way. This
whole course tends to that whole debate about what sustainable
development is and how we can achieve it and so on. We prefer
not to use that terminology, although it is totally related to
the sort of things that you are looking at. I wrote about sustainable
development ten years ago, but I do not think that debate has
moved on. The big benefit of it, of course, is that at least politically
it keeps this issue in people's minds. The mere fact that people
are using that phrase is quite important, difficult though that
phrase is to comprehend. In terms of enthusiasm, people involved
in environment are enthusiastic, but the worry is that people
who are not involved are not enthusiastic. That is the difficult
gap to bridge. You see this in your daily life with citizens.
The people we attract to these courses are people who are already
in the family, and going beyond that is a challenge to all of
us.
Q474 Chairman: Would you say that
many of the academics involved have little time for sustainable
development in that sense?
Professor Blowers: All the ones
that we have been working with have time and enthusiasm for this
particular approach that we have used. If you asked them individually
if they were in favour of sustainable development, there would
be all sorts of academic debates as to what you meant by that.
Q475 Chairman: So it is not a concept
that has lost credence over time?
Professor Blowers: I think academically—I
just think it is vague. In a sense, it is one of those portmanteau
terms, but the beauty of it is that it does relate to the two
things we are talking about, and that is that you have to know
about and integrate ideas of society and environment. The two
go together; they are not separate. If it does nothing else, that
is what sustainable development does—but there are all sorts
of interpretations, some of which say "we can have everything
anyway; you can have a good environment and plenty of economic
growth"; but some people say that that is absolutely impossible.
There are massive debates within this. The value of that term
to me is that it does keep it on the policy agenda—and look
at the impact it has had in that sense! People are struggling
to interpret it. I think that that will be the ongoing problem.
Q476 Chairman: On that note, thank
you for the time you have given us this morning. We very much
hope that this exchange has perhaps gone some way towards recharging
your batteries.
Professor Blowers: We would like
to leave you with the course, as so far delivered, plus some smaller
sheets that will help you to get the general background.
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