Week 18

From Adult Learning to Sustainability – What has Bildung got to do with it?

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Week 18 Marion Fields

I am a British-Finnish adult educator working for a Finnish study centre. Study centres are non-formal adult education institutions that focus on civil society. My organisation, the Sivis Study Centre, has 76 NGOs as its members, representing a wide array of Finnish civil society. Through our organisation, they receive public funding for their educational and training activities. We also support our members pedagocially, organise courses, manage studies and projects to develop new educational concepts and do a lot of other things.

Together with other types of non-formal adult education institutions we form what is known as the liberal adult education sector. In Finnish we call it vapaa sivistystyö, with the word ‘sivistys’ meaning ‘Bildung’ in Finnish. Bildung as an idea of self-maturation and realisation through knowledge and personal autonomy and how it is transformed into collective action by volunteering and campaigning is something that interests me a great deal.

Like the adult learning and education community in many countries, we have focused in recent years on skills, but now the tide seems to have changed. During the last year we have been speaking a lot about the wider foundation of our work, of Bildung. One reason may be that the Covid-19 pandemic has made us stop and consider our foundations. Another explanation is that adult educators agree that we need to play a part in solving t wicked problems like climate change. The Finnish voluntary sector is increasingly interested in doing the right thing by taking a more sustainable course of action; our organisation will try to help them on the way.

Currently I manage a project called ‘Sustainable Bildung for the voluntary sector’. Financed by the Bildung+ programme at the Sitra foundation (https://www.sitra.fi/en/topics/bildung/ ), our aim is to study and develop learning practices in a sector that faces increased competition over people’s time. Even though last year over 40 % of the Finnish population volunteered, we are unsure how much they actually learn as courses and volunteering periods are increasingly short and episodic. NGOs and charities, whose mission has for decades been to educate people and foster Bildung, are now equally unsure of their role, even though they provide transversal and other skills needed in campaigning and other tasks. We’ve developed many methods for validating these skills with them. But the bigger picture is blurred. Why do we learn when we volunteer?

As one solution for connecting volunteers and their organisations to the wider idea of the common good in our times, we have been talking about transformative learning. We ran a case study with five courses and three study circles, which are peer learning groups we support, to find out what kind of learning transforms lives when the question is sustainability and sustainable lifestyles. We found out that peer learning is valued and that transformation mainly takes place at a personal level and becomes visible in how we consume things. Our adult learners felt that their families were very supportive, which helped them adopt new eating habits, fly less and so on. One group had travelled to Helsinki to meet their local MP to talk about sustainability.

We have traditionally seen Bildung as a normative top-down matter of ‘civilising’ people, but in our time this simply does not work. Our learners and trainers mentioned interaction with their peers and the ideological background of their organisation as a great inspiration. We need to support the voluntary sector in their co-creation efforts to make them remain a relevant space for learning and BIldung.

I wrote a few months ago about my learning utopia in ELM magazine https://elmmagazine.eu/future-of-adult-education/tomorrows-learning-utopias-and-dystopias/ , where I envisioned a renaissance for peer learning. After completing our case study, I feel even more strongly so. A group of enthusiastic learners take mutual responsibility of their learning and they support each other emotionally as well. Emotions are still neglected as factor contributing to adult learning, but our learners said that in a group they could alleviate their climate change related anxieties and think about positive action instead.

Our learners realised that they also needed scientific knowledge to back their learning, so they shared articles, listened to lectures and engaged in other activities. This is where their NGOs need to play a role: They need to offer their expertise and factual information to support their volunteers and their groups. This is also a challenge for the adult learning and education community: how do we help our learners discover knowledge and learning that is factual but that they can relate to, reflect, discuss with others, and that will help them in their process for self-realisation and Bildung? This is one of my next steps as an adult educator to discover.

You can connect with Marion on Twitter @marion_fields