Linking Civic Ecologies: Building a Platform for Integrating Professions, Publics, and Academia

• In Event: Holistic Education, Learning From Experience, and Pedagogy

Abstract

‘Linking Civic Ecologies’ is a collaboration between researchers based in two universities working with communities to ethically solve local and regional problems. In contrast to the academic habit of adopting what John Dewey called the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, our view is that professionals and academics have as much to learn from publics as they might do from us. Our interest is in how academics can facilitate ‘bottom-linked’ integration of varied ‘communities of practice’ across complex civic ecologies in a shared ‘community of inquiry’. We explore how people use evidence to make sense of their experience and create conditions in which the contribution of educational research to the generation of agendas of consequence can be fully realised.

Authors

• Vivienne Baumfield, University of Exeter
  Presenting Author

• Eric Lybeck, University of Manchester
  Presenting Author