The nature of the Floating Classroom project is to develop the affordances around going into communities and opening up spaces which are equipped to cultivate threads of interest which reside in those communities. This means having everything that a classroom might normally have in a higher education context, except on a mobile basis.

 

Like UNICEF created their ‘School in a Box‘ scheme, providing the basic fundamental tools to communities to set up a classroom, the idea here is to have a ‘floating classroom’ where we apply learning taken from human development work. Specifically, Ernesto Sirolli and participatory action research, where the community are listened to and their learning trajectory is decided by their own interests and the issues which they face in their day to day lives.

 

The importance of a ‘floating classroom’ (a classroom which can be set up anywhere, and transported on public transport) is that in many of the places which most need facilities like this there is no space to develop such a facility. The Most Deprived neighbourhoods are social, educational and economic deserts, often with only a pub, cafe, bookmaker, payday lender and fast food outlet.

 

A ‘floating classroom’ then brings the affordances necessary to do educational and social activities which are relevant to the community of individuals.

 

Often people from the Most Deprived neighbourhoods have not had much educational opportunity in the formal sense, and what learning has taken place is self developed. The idea is to get into these spaces and appreciate what learning has gone on and provide complimentary tools, skills and activities – in that order. Bringing individuals, who are self led, into proximity with tools of a digital lab and the internet (the floating classroom) will extend their capabilities for producing what is of interest to them.

 

For example, an individual has an interest in hip hop music, and suddenly they have the ability to record, edit and produce sound recordings of their own compositions; then ensues a situation where there is the opportunity to teach digital – and other – skills which further extend their capabilities.

 

Once there has been interest generated and investment made, it will become clear what activities are most relevant to those individuals, and the equipment and group working can be used to develop structured scenarios which take them further towards their ideals and interests. For example setting up social evenings which might lead to an income stream, further creative and intellectual opportunities, and/or paid work in the field.

 

Similarly, regular events/opportunities can be brought together in tandem where people external to formal education can use (and/or develop) the skills which are most contextual to their life circumstance to bring them into proximity with more traditional forms of pedagogy. The model here is to take Sugata Mitra’s work and adapt it to the community context, where individuals will be taught how to find the relevant information to answer certain exam questions.

 

Using the internet to answer a standard grade mathematics exam for example. This cultivates a different kind of learning which is self led, and which generates meta skills that translate out into broader contexts.

 

These meta skills of being able to identify relevant information, being able to use digital equipment to search for relevant content, being able to apply it to a specific context, are all adaptable abilities which are highly important in the information complexity of the modern world. Teaching digital literacies in restricted circumstances must flow from the bottom to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

 

Using the floating classroom to create digital artifacts, the communities can start to generate and own their own blogs, social media, websites, films, audio; and retrospectively these can be valued by formal educators for the necessary skills that individuals have had to engage to create them.

 

There is considerable evidence which show that publishing students work is a powerful way to cement learning, and gain investment from the individual. A sense of accomplishment comes with creating something, and then a sense of investment comes with owning something. On the back of this whole futures can be built which are always specific to the individual, and owned by the individual.

 

Not only valuable modern life skills can be generated but by looking at various educators work on accreditation of prior learning – specifically Prof Keith Smyth et al – for those who have an interest kindled, the floating classroom can act as a conduit to formal education or even employability once relevant skills have been grasped.

 

Finally, and possibly the most important, the sociological value of engendering Participatory Action Research in and around communities has a great public value. There are a great number of voices and stories which are under-represented in the Most Deprived communities. By using these techniques of valuing the authentic voices of disenfranchised sections of the population, important understandings can be built by the people themselves highlighting social justice issues that have gone hitherto unnoticed.

 

For example, examining why care leavers are not engaging in higher education, identifying why ex-offenders are not getting into gainful employment, identifying impoverished housing conditions or lack of local amenities.

 

All of this combines together to create a situation of ownership which can be build upon for the individual, and where community can find purchase to develop according to its needs. The project would be focused on seizing upon the emergent opportunities that are created by the individuals and communities of practice that have been exposed to an extension of their capabilities.

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The Necessity of a Focus on the Communities Needs

The project is inherently focused on the the community and individuals which compose it. The values of sharing, developing and creating will act as a lens to focus interests amongst people. Offering guidance and support in a tailored fashion, and cultivating the trust which is the bedrock of community, the opportunities to promote community development can be engineered as the needs of that populace come to be understood.

 

On an elementary level, special attention will be paid to structuring situations where there is a mixture of bonding, bridging and linking forms of social capital that are specifically inclusive. This means bringing people together of like minds, bringing people together of different interests, and bringing people together of different socio-economic status.  In plain language, building inclusive networks of people who like sharing their knowledge and skills.

 

As the introduction to the tools and the development of the skills comes together, then structured activities can be developed which are specific and relevant to that locale. Structured activities such as identifying and mapping community assets can be done to build awareness in the community. Websites and digital resources can be created for local amenities and organisations such as local churches, businesses, groups, clubs, community centres and artists.

 

The project will be community led in that, from understanding the development work of people like Ernesto Sirolli, the most important aspect of community development – outside of identification of assets – is that development workers do not walk into community contexts with preformed templated ideas of what that area needs.

 

Most importantly, we shut up and listen… This is when learning takes place. Reflective and reflexive relationships have to be formed before the needs of the community can be identified and acted upon.

 

 

Whatever the activity, whatever the skills, on a personal and collective level, the actions of the project will be to leave legacy artifacts and instruments. In simple terms, everything which is done should leave something which is owned by the individual or community, such that it plays a functional role in their lives and can be carried forward independently of the project.

 

Similarly, it is aimed to develop principality as well as agency meaning that, as a project, through the activities of storytelling and ethnographic method, it will help identify the structural questions which the community needs to ask to collectively improve its holdings.

 

For example, identifying a need to clear up a fly-tipping area on its doorstep which is an issue for the local authority to address, identifying the need for communal spaces, a disproportionate population of non-English speaking population, questioning discrimination by companies which do not respect the rehabilitation of offenders act or the requirement of an extra bus service.

 

Everything starts with the means to do.  What the Floating Classroom provides are the means to make what the people want, and build what they need.  It is a project about building human capabilities

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Photo Gallery of Proof of Concept

 

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Addendum: Several Years Later

I am going to keep this brief here but leave a note just to update thinking on this.  The Floating Classroom was effective in that it was a compact digital classroom which could be transported by public transport and deployed, in our case, in a local community center.  What became apparent is that the community mainly were uninterested in structured digital skills teaching like you find in a formal setting and more interested in getting their contextual problems responded to.  The main problems seemed to come with the use of Microsoft as a system and a general lack of digital hygiene on the internet.

 

Microsoft and various corporate producers of software maintain an interest in overloading the hardware and producing products with inbuilt obsolescence.  They also lack any moral compass in terms of sustainability and digital privacy resulting in corporate behaviours which privilege the strip mining of personal data for their profit resulting in the hardware and internet connections becoming poorly responsive and ineffective.  Only a few people wanted to learn how to maintain their computer or change their behaviours on the computer resulting in dependency through uncertainty and fear.  Corporate sponsors are a problem as are the products they proffer as they generally produce dependency which leads to some moral hazard.

 

For those who were prepared to learn, Linux operating systems offered great benefits in terms of security, stability and improving the internet connection because the bandwidth was not being taken up by telemetry and data gathering.  Linux Mint was the most proximal to the Windows environment and people who took that step adapted in a day to understand it was doing much the same as Windows was before.  For those with older laptops, Linux LXLE did a great job of reversing redundancy and offering a functional computer. Both versions of Linux were out of the box feature rich with equivalent programs such as Libre Office and media players.

 

 

The weak point for the floating classroom came with the obvious need for a Quartermaster roll where a checklist of equipment needed to be checked in and out with someone overseeing the return of all equipment to the box at the end of each session.  It was a collaboration with People Know How and they as an organisation did not implement this observational recommendation and soon chargers, mice and other elements went astray and the computers were repurposed ad hoc throughout the organisation.  So, if it is to function as a mobile digital classroom it needs to be maintained as so and not appropriated by people through the organisation for other projects.

 

The pedagogical side was only really effective in one to one training in human capabilities terms.  Group sessions resulted in piecemeal progress and fragmented joined up pictures – which are needed to understand how to look after and use a computer.  Most of the issues which people had were computers clogged up with crap, infected from malware, bloatware and commercially exploitative software, and the taking over of the windows operating system by advertising-and-data-expropriation forces on the internet.

 

The mobile classroom is certainly feasible and is a proof of concept, but it needs to be matched with clear tailored responses to communities and individuals.  The use of community centers and third sector organisations also presented an issue with the gatekeeping and curation of ‘client groups’; this is little discussed and recognised but due to the way that funding and resources are given it produces a situation were the people become the product and access to people was constricted sufficiently to not be able to do meaningful-enough work.

 

Collectively this project led me to do critical thinking in terms of digital pedagogy. Noting the unspoken issues is the most important aspect to understanding why there is not progress in this area.  The digital environment has specific and distinct harms associated with it and I spend some time working these in to conversation with educators at the University of Manchester.

 

To bring into sharp relief the situation in terms of digital – and to help the reader tune in – I shall use frank terms.  Microsoft is a disaster for people who have not learned how to hack the operating system so that it works for the user/owner of the license; formal organisations are in hock to the big tech suppliers and Taylorism which governs their actions; communities and the people most in need have been turned into the product.  Lots of BS and fantastical dreams are sold through the promises of technology.  Smartphones are a cognitive disaster zone as are social media environments.