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How is Liveness equitable, and what are the indicators of this in Live Learning opportunities?
For Liveness to be equitable, there should be recognition and celebration of all participants' value, knowledge and experience. There also needs to be a shared ethic of care and support for everyone involved. As a mutual learning experience, Live learning also incorporates pedagogies of care, where the planning, research, design and activities are all framed in an understanding of mutual support.
Key Themes and Questions:
Building Partnerships
Many examples of live learning are built on relationships between the school of architecture and collaborators outside the university, that have been fostered over a number of years. We have found that these relationships flourish because they are based on mutual trust around roles, responsibilities, and valuing the experience as well as outcomes of projects.
Live learning opportunities are created to be useful in both their activities and outputs. This approach actively avoids asking for partners' time and energy without giving back, otherwise known as 'consultation fatigue'.
Long-term partnerships are incredibly useful as they enable short term action, medium term development and long term strategy. Initiatives that are suggested one year, are often explored the next year, building a body of knowledge and ensuring core need is met.
"In our experience, this type of opportunity for a deeper two-way integration between the University and wider society is essential in enabling effective collaboration and knowledge exchange."
(Gareth Roberts, Regather Director)
Fostering Mutual Respect
Mutual respect is the cornerstone of thriving learning environments and societies. Valuing local knowledge and communities as specialists to learn from is vital to the success of liveness. Fostering Mutual respect in Live learning contexts means that all stakeholders are considered as people who are invested in learning from each other, and a shared understanding that they are involved in a process of knowledge exchange.
Fostering mutual respect is an active process that is underpinned by ethics of care and support for one another.
"Gilligan Underscores the importance of care rooted in qualities like closeness, compassion, and mutual respect, leading to moral judgments centred around empathy, harm prevention, and suffering avoidance "
Amplifying and Advocating for Under-represented Voices
Liveness aims to explore ways, techniques and opportunities of enabling marginalised people and voices to be represented and heard. An example of this is Storying - which encourages people to tell their stories through creative means.
"Representation is a key step towards equality. People telling their own stories in their own voices. Though this seems like an obvious step it is a vital one. Simply; you won’t change what you don’t understand, and you can’t understand what you don’t see. The ability to imagine a world that is different than the world we live in now is the beginning of affecting meaningful change."
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