Learning in your genes: Enacting the ecology of mind

The session explores emerging perspectives of ecological postmodernism and enactivism as a basis for reconceptualising learning and teaching in a changing and increasingly complex world. The ecological approach is informed by the emergence of a unified philosophical framework for understanding biological and social phenomena.

In this view the teaching/learning setting can be viewed as a system that is characterised by mental events. The dialogical processes of language and communication between teachers, students and the subject can be seen as the pathways in which the processes of information exchange and transformation occur. Knowledge and understanding emerge from the complex interactions between the different parts as information travels around the physical and mental pathways that constitute the total ecology of mind or mental system.

The session explores the questions: in what ways do ecological systems and mental systems share the same characteristics? How can we conceive of a teaching/learning setting as an ecosystem? Is ecology just a metaphor for thinking about a process or does a networked learning environment function like an ecosystem? In summary, the key idea is that teaching/learning is an ecosystemic process of transforming information into knowledge, in which teacher-subject-student relationships are embedded or situated in a context where complex interacting influences shape the quality of learning outcomes. The aim of this new ecological approach is to enhance and optimise learning in the complex ecology of ideas that constitutes the university in the knowledge society.