The document discusses developing a framework for a learning environment that promotes sustainable development. It proposes moving away from content-based assessment towards a more goal-oriented process that values students' cultures. An exploratory learning environment (ELE) is suggested where assessment is collaborative and focuses on the learning process. Students are empowered to critically link academic and community knowledge. The roles of teacher and student are shared, and all voices are validated.

1. A Learning Environment for a
Sustainable Future
10th UNESCO-APEID International
Conference 2006
Dr Lynne Vey

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Introduction
• The purpose of developing a framework for a
learning environment was to contribute to
change in the way assessment of learning is
conducted in view of the shift of education
values from content based (creating a ‘cultural
gap’) towards a more goal-oriented process.
• Assessment is characterised by a strong
antipathy to language, issues and values of
western cultures (modernism), evident by
• The regulation of class, racial and gender
difference through rigid forms of assessment to
sort and track.

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Challenge
• Greatest challenge to educators is facilitating
sustainable development which enables young
people to benefit from educational opportunities
designed to promote a sustainable future.
• Can learning and assessment be linked in a
culturally inclusive learning environment?

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Possible when
• Approaches to teaching and learning
incorporate information systems which generate
new socializing contexts for students as well as
• Valuing their cultures as legitimate in the
process of forging a personal and collective
identity.
• Thus a relationship can exist between learning
and assessment as it centres on dialogic
interactions;
• The roles of teacher and student are shared and
all voices are validated

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Sustainable Development
• This approach, whilst it may create challenges
and discomfort, opens up
• Creative possibilities for aligning learning and
assessment in an environment that values home
cultures.
• Helps integrate concepts such as cultural
pluralism together with enhancing students’
motivation, self-assessment and self-awareness,
and
• Achieves this by enabling students irrespective
of their particular experiential conditions to

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Premise
• That educational values should not only inform
assessment in terms of outcomes and
accountability as specified by in national
guidelines, they should
• Also support a pedagogic process which helps
to develop in students a heightened sense of the
value of their own contributions to the
community, academic or otherwise
• The idea that cultural pluralism helps us to
embrace the concept of culture more as
historically-shaped experiences, rather than
arbitrarily identified features (such as race or

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Cultural Pluralism
• Reflects the diversity of interactions which form
our frames of reference and which, as a result,
• Inform our interpretations of reality.
• Culture, in this sense, is irreducible to language,
nation, or any other feature, and demands from
teachers a more complex understanding of the
• Motivations and perception informing our
students’ approach to learning activities.

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Empowering students
• To be agents of change can only occur when
learning environments are cultural inclusive, and
support exploratory and critical learning.
• When assessment criteria predetermine the
learning outcomes, students’ learning needs are
also predetermined, this process
• alienates students from their sociocultural context
which shapes them and from which they derive
their identity and their sense of their own value.
• Thus students become an object of pedagogic
tools rather than rightful participants in the lives of
their various communities

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Sustainable Development
• Significant advantages can be gained when
assessment is not limited to a measure of a
‘product’ (for example an external examination)
but
• Is based in pedagogy enabling critical
negotiation
• Students develop a sense of ownership of their
learning task
• Feel motivated to explore conflicting issues and
• Value the assessment process
• Hence become agents of change in creating
their own sustainable future.

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Sustainable future
• Because this approach centres on human
concerns and values
• It asserts the dignity and worth of humans and
their capacity for self-actualization
• Through the use of reason and scientific inquiry
Rousseau assumed was the best way for
students to learn
• ‘the power of the environment determines the
success of educational encounters’ (a view
shared by Dewey)
• Maximize human potential rather than restrict it

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Create conditions
• For sustainable development, education needs to
be a process whereby learning is continuous and
reflective and assessment is continuous and
collaborative reflection
• The implication then is to consider assessment as a
continuous process which represents a significant
conceptual shift that extends beyond assessment
as mastery of knowledge (which prohibits
sustainability by excluding students and their
culture from the process)
• to assessment of learning goals “outcomes in
critical thinking, cultural understanding, empathy,
citizenship and social responsibility” (Astin 1996).

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ESD
• When children adopt the attitudes and behaviours
of the society they inhibit, they are rewarded with a
sense of belonging.
• Children who do not adopt the norms of their
culture often have a sense of discomfort or
dissatisfaction with the environment
• A Learning Environment for a Sustainable Future
subverts the notion of assessment and looks at
aspects of learning environments enhancing the
relationship between curricula and culture and
learning and students’ own assessment which
supports a sustainable future.

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Exploratory Learning Environment
• When students are empowered to learn by
critically linking academic and other forms of
knowledge residing in their community
• The assessment process becomes a
meaningful tool to them and they become
involved in their assessment and
• Its relationship to their culture and own realities
• The main goals then are to broaden
experiences for students, to individualise
learning activities and contexts to better
support assessment of learning

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Framework
• The framework for the Exploratory Learning
Environment draws on a number of principals
generally associated with humanist,
constructivist, and postmodern
• Students’ way of knowing, and how they learn
cannot be divorced from their individual, and yet
• Socially (interactively) constructed (negotiated)
cultural experiences (terms of reference)

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The philosophy
• Exploratory Learning Environment promotes
engagement and construction, thus supports
• Learning for a sustainable future through
• Cultural experience
• Inquiry
• Experimentation
• Critical reflection

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Approach
• Focuses student learning on developing critical
thinking skills whose validation comes from their
own evaluation, rather than from an abstract
source of authority, and at the same time
• Teachers learn to reduce the grip they hold on
the learning and assessment process by
adopting
• The role of a facilitator of students’ negotiation
process

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Different
• From traditional practices where the learning
process is restricted, rather than enhanced, by
assessment as
• Assessment is holistic (all parts are included,
especially culture) and students are equal
partners in the process of achieving
sustainability and stakeholders in their
communities, because classrooms are natural
learning environments which
• Creates conditions for students to be agents of
change in development a sustainable future

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Overview
• Learning environments more flexible as they
• Relate to the world students live in and serves the
needs of all students not just serving perceived
needs
• which sustain traditional concepts of hierarchy and
control by the nature of the environment
• The control in an Exploratory Learning Environment
(ELE) is left completely to the user and this
encourages students to
• explore and experiment
• to uncover relationships and
• to make meaning and
• to make informed decisions

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ELE Framework
• Supports expansive learning by providing opportunities for
students to engage in environments that support their
articulation, explication and defend their ideas and hidden
motives
• Students are able to manage meaning amid a high degree of
uncertainty about how to accept and have ownership of their
learning.
• The key features of the ELE1 Facilitate and support learning
2 Recognise cultural diversity and home cultures
3 Engage students in higher level cognitive activities
4 Opportunities and means for motivating and effective
self-directed learning
5 Enable learning by doing
6 Support assessment of learning by focusing no the
process of learning through constant and constructive

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Learning-by-doing
• Supportive environments
• Exploration
• Experimentation
• Experience/Discovery
• Inquiry
• Critical Dialogue
• Reflection and Culture as a process of meaning
• Feedback or self and peer assessment
• Cooperative learning
• ICTs

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The ELE Methodology
• The methodology is composed of six steps, which
involves
1) the rationale,
2) setting the context of the classroom, i.e. setting
conditions which allow students to negotiate the
terms of reference which inform their interpretations
of the learning demands),
3) generate opportunities,
4) feedback loop,
5) assessment stages - connect learning with
assessment,
6) evaluation and reflection.

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Implementing the ELE
• The program was designed to illustrate the
effectiveness of exploratory learning
environments and comprised six different
activities to take place over an eight-week period.
The context was Conflict, however it can be
easily adapted to other contexts such as
Urbanisation.
• Activity One – Investigation
• Activity Two -Analysing – Conflict (Urbanisation)
• Activity Three – Growth and Development
• Activity Four – Situation
• Activity Five – Conflict (Urbanisation) as a domination
feature
• Activity Six – Historical View

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Assessing Learning in the ELE
• Explore/Understanding
• Engaging/Inquiry
• Discovering/Investigation
• Validating/Interpretation
• Internalising/Communication
• Evaluation/Consideration

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Validating Relationships
• The ELE therefore, offers an environment that enables
students to be inquirers,
• thereby understanding what it means to be in charge of
their own learning, monitor their success and make
decisions.
• Assessment in the ELE model focused on identifying the
process of learning and the product of that process,
which not only met students’ needs for understandability
and motivation but removes the ‘culture gap’.
• Educators are then better positioned to document
learning, and make informed decisions, thus all the
stakeholders benefit from the reality of meeting
accountability and outcomes when exploratory learning
environments optimize the relationship between the

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Conclusion
• How assessment can influence learning?
Dewey urged that educators provide conditions
that enable the student to engage in inquiry, and
to guide inquiry so that it leads to a broader
understanding of the culture to which the student
is to enter.
• In other words, students should learn through
assessment. This will be achieved if educators
and administrators appreciate the value of
learning environments which facilitate inquiry,
investigations, interpretations, and
understanding of one with nature and apply
these fundamentals when evaluating and

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Realising ESD
• the paradigmatic shift in the ELE framework is a
shift from traditional classrooms to learning
environments in which the teacher is a learning
resource (rather than a controller of learning),
• the integration of constructivism, asserts that we
learn through a continual process of constructing
and interpreting,
• while postmodernism accepts modifying our own
versions of reality based on our own cultural
experiences

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Inclusive classrooms
• Classrooms and students are not just settings for
implementing ideas; they are frameworks of
interpretation that teachers use for knowing:
• knowing when and how to act and react, what
information to present or explain and how, when to
respond or correct individual students, how to assess
and reformulate what they have just taught to.
• Finally students’ ability to explain and justify their course
of action demonstrates their understanding of the real
world, as well as their capacity to reason systematically
when defending their own version of reality.
• Thus, it is concluded, learning is enhanced when
assessment does not serve itself, but to improve
students’ learning conditions, i.e. cultural inclusive
learning environments which better contextualize

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Questions & Answers
• Invite questions from the audience

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Thank You
Dr Lynne Vey
Canberra
Australia
December 2006
http://www.weiproductions.com.au
http://www.lynnevey.com