Education's Ecosystems

Education’s Ecosystems offers a new perspective on learning that is integrated and connected to lived experience. It presents a model for salient characteristics of both biological and pedagogical ecosystems, involving diversity, interaction, emergence, construction, interpretation. Examples from around the world show how learning can be made more whole and relevant. The book should be valuable to educators, parents, policy makers, and anyone interested in democratic education.

With this publication, the philosophy of education has finally evolved to fit its contemporary ecosystem, in which life, social structures and technological artifacts constantly reconfigure the nature of knowledge, learning and understanding. Bruce’s conceptualization of education—inspired by the ecological model—provides the kind of liberating approach needed to shake off the ossified assumptions and practices of the past. This is a lively, accessible, grounded, comprehensive and inspiring stroll through a new educational environment, richly illustrated with insightful stories from the author’s exemplary lifelong learning adventures. Sure to stimulate any student of education to envision innovative escapes from schooling’s quagmire., To many students, school lacks meaning, but it does not have to be that way. Bruce shows what education would be like if Dewey were updated for the postmodern world. When schooling becomes an ecological environment, students can grapple with complex networks of interconnected tasks and joining ideas that matters to deep engagement in learning activities. Linking things children care about with real-world experiences educates children for life.Is student a living thing in the community and society or an object to receive lecture and produce grades? On this essential stance of schooling and education, Bruce compels us to examine this obvious yet often avoided question, using prolific descriptions, thought-provoking arguments, and lived examples from diverse cultures. Drawing from the concept of ecosystem, he paints education as interconnections of people and things, of formal and informal learning, where students are alive and thrive., Bruce argues for a conception of school as embedded within, and an integral component of, the communities in which we live.Bruce suggests “If learning is truly open to the world, the teacher doesn't have to, cannot, know it all. Instead, she or he becomes a fellow explorer, possibly a knowledgeable guide, but not the final answer to anything.”Bruce is an artful questioner and Education’s Ecosystem: Learning Through Life tackles many questionable assumptions on education. It could easily be titled ‘questions for educators - other ways of thinking about school and community’.Bruce argues consistently that education happens in the community. He takes us beyond the near and the obvious. We are presented, quite literally, with a global perspective, an ecosystem of education that may be embraced and nurtured for learning about the world.

Bertram C. Bruce has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is currently a Professor Emeritus in Information Science at the University of Illinois. He has worked on education in many countries, across grade levels, and in diverse areas of the curriculum. His work contributes to a tradition of democratic education, asking “How can we guide the educational enterprise by an ethical vision, not simply a technocratic one of transmitting isolated facts and skills?”