Project COSMOS

Becoming a citizen in today's world focuses learning on cultures of sustainability with multi-subject organised syllabuses. This defines the COSMOS project.

Current work in COSMOS involves creating and testing the elements of a global distance concept mapping for communities in the form of a prototype 'citizen's environmental network'. The latter was envisaged almost two decades ago in the UK Strategy for Sustainable Development, where it was referred to as a community tool for the Biodiversity Strategy. The aim was to spread ideas and achievements about operating plans for environmental improvements as an exercise in interactive citizenship. It was to be pump-primed by Government and then run by community volunteers, but nothing has happened in the interim to realise this community-led objective. COSMOS provides on-line resources to promote the creation of local special areas of sustainability and make the long-term action plans necessary for the community to move towards sustainable development. These plans should give priority to strengthening local groups and institutions using local resources to meet local needs. Regarding the value of cross-curricular educational frameworks, this is certainly testified to by the fact that there are between one and two million unique visitors to the COSMOS web sites each year and several hundred people register for my blog on cultural ecology every day.

Can we tease out any principles of creativity from this personal scientific heritage trail?

Looking at my own brief encounter with the evolution of gill electrolyte metabolism as a research student and the emerging lateral signposts which eventually led me (and are still leading me) to explore new areas of knowledge, I think I can, retrospectively define a congenial environment that allowed my own creativity to flourish. As a recipe it has to foster systems thinking to express :

•openness to novelty in ways of thinking;

•the acceptance of personal differences in origins and mind set;

•divergence from conventional understanding.

The necessary socio-scientific structure has to include a willingness to reward divergence in thinking. This covers flexibility to allow

•negotiation of change to a new status quo;

•risk taking with no fear of the consequences of failure

•and leadership to promote working together.

Another important set of questions then emerges concerned where these behaviours originate. In particular, can they be taught, when teachers are usually selected for their orthodoxy not their novelty.

COSMOS: Go There!