low carbon

Becoming an active reader requires using highlighter pens, scrawl, doodles, post-it notes and anything else you fancy to annotate a text, as participants in Bath Universitys’ LowCarbonWorks Learning History Workshop discover.

The idea is to respond to a particular narrative about low carbon innovation with your own ideas, emotional reactions, questions, and comments about what interested or surprised you and notes about themes of relevance to your own work.

In this way, new active readers expand the learning from the previous version of the text and to some extent make it their own.

Margaret Gearty, the action researcher behind this new application of the learning history to low carbon innovation in local authorities, defines two types of reader:

• The active reader is someone exploring the value and relevance of the History for their own learning.

• The participating reader is someone directly or indirectly involved in the history who have helped to shape it with stories and comments about how events took shape.

An important definition of a learning history is “a jointly told tale”. It differs from a typical case study because it seeks out more than one perspective and includes more of the messy human dimension of change.

If you’ve had the active reader experience, add your comments about it to this post.

You can also click on this link for an example of a learning history about the development of a combined heat and power district heating and cooling scheme by Southampton City Council.

Quick link to Learning History blog site 

A highly interactive Learning History workshop for achieving low carbon reduction in local authorities has led to the creation of the UK’s first ever online collaborative learning history. Created and hosted by CARPP PhD action researcher, Margaret Gearty, the site is inviting comments and continuing participation from those who came to the workshop and others whom they may recommend.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the workshop in Bath in February 2008, you can read  the various stories of low carbon innovation such as the development of a district heating system in Southampton or the widespread use of biomass in Barnsley and see and hear what other people learnt.

The idea of using blogging technology, although innovative when applied to creating a joint learning history, has already established a place in higher education. For some background to how this learning movement is developing we refer you to the following paper: Exploring the place of blogs in higher education

Story teller and facilitator, Geoff Mead

Story Circle Guidelines 

The story circle was a feature of lowcarbonworks’ first successful learning history event for local authorities in February 2008. Story telling was a particularly rich experience for some participants who told us that there was very rarely a forum such as the one we created for the rapid exchange of inspiring ideas. Telling a story is also a lot more personal, some would say intimate, than reading a case study. Some of the seemingly random or irrelevant detail left out of a traditional case study can be found to have enormous value for engaging and resonating with an audience’s own experience and need to feel a sense of relationship with the story.

However, there is a discipline to a successful exchange of stories so some ground rules help. Accesible from the green link above are the guidelines we used at our event which was facilitated by Geoff Mead from the Centre for Narrative Leadership. We include them for the benefit of people who want to give this exercise a go.

Our prompt was firstly a trial round where the instruction was: “Tell a one minute story about a person, an event or a time that first made you aware of the need for carbon reduction”. Followed by a round using the instruction: Tell a three minute story from your own experience abaout a successful innovation (for carbon reduction) in a Local Authority or other public setting.” �