Developing a learning region beyond its borders

"Stone has no hope of being anything but stone. But from collaborating, it assembles and becomes a temple."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Making territory

I had the opportunity to interview Bruno Latour at the 4th Université de l'Innovation Publique organized by the Centre National de la Fonction Publique Territoriale. The questions of where and how to live are crucial. Heidegger's "dasein" or "being-there" is particularly important at a time in our planet's history when biodiversity and climate disruption are becoming critical.

How does a region experience these challenges?

Time is of the essence, and we have to recognize with humility that we can't help people whose lifestyles and interests we don't know. It therefore takes time to get to know each other so that trust can be built up, and that means spending time together.

The context of colonization inevitably weighs heavily and probably increases the length of this time. It is possible to create collective intelligence; when trust is present, it is perfectly feasible to co-construct.

Questions to ask yourself

How do you get into a territory you don't live in, and become a legitimate bearer or instigator of a collective project?

To do this, you need to spend some time listening, either by itinerating, walking for a week across the region in a project team, for example, with a donkey, and listening to the people and sharing what you've heard in the evening. This slow, walking diagnosis, with no other objective than to listen and feel, is a way of entering into the reality of the local people.

But there are other ways of doing things

• Intervene in a "residency format", to work on a concrete problem by living with the bearers of a problem situation, feeling what they are going through and using frugal design practices to provide the beginnings of a very rapid solution.
  
  
• Use the "narrative practices" invented with Australian aborigines to help them build new narratives and "decolonize their minds". The spoken word can be a liberating force, and local residents can be invited to write and produce narratives that tell of their pride, their successful actions and their relationships with others. A poetic dimension restores a person's story to them, who in turn can listen to stories that are their resources for action.
  
  
• Place a camera in a square, a neighborhood or a village, and let curiosity take over. What is this camera doing here without a videographer? Young people and local residents come to see what it's all about. Suggest that they film the beginnings of a story about what they want to say, provide a few technical elements to help them become independent filmmakers, improvise a film session in a nearby location, sense the interest of local people and open up a dialogue about what we have to say. Foster the desire to become the author of the story.
  
  
• Support a desire/need for a shared space, solar oven, heating or garden, and turn it into a project to challenge our need to learn. The aim here is to support the desire of local residents, not to take their place.
  
  
• To open a third place, a space that combines the functions of a restaurant, a place to welcome ideas and projects, a place to play cooperative games, to invent challenges. A symbolic place where people can meet and where ideas can be supported and helped.
  
  
• Create a dynamic of "challenges" led by the local population and traditional authorities, and train facilitators and committed players to learn how to harness collective energies. Launch a call for challenges and create an event to accelerate the realization of these challenges.
  
  
• Identify traditional knowledge leaders, help them express their talents, assign them a researcher who observes what enables them to succeed, offer them the opportunity to grow their talent, help them tell others how to go about it, document their know-how.
  
  
• Draw inspiration from the Maisons Familiales et Rurales (family-run farms in France that have self-organized schools to prevent their young people from leaving the countryside). The school is run and supported by the families, rules of life are instilled, trips are organized and farm schools are supported.
  
  
• Take inspiration from reciprocal knowledge exchange networks: everyone knows something (cooking, repairing, cycling, poetry, computer skills, etc.) and can teach it to someone else in a give-and-take system. A network gives dignity to all knowledge.

Anthropologists and ethnologists have provided an answer by integrating the territory over a long period and often allowing themselves to be transformed by it. In this context, is a knowledge-based approach conceivable?

A knowledge-based approach is conceivable, but it has to be based on all forms of knowledge, not just the "learned knowledge" usually put forward. There's a part of the imagination and vision to be sown, to be told and made to feel that it's possible to dream of taking up the thread of one's history, of living in one's own way and seeking to excel in what's already there. There's probably a need for a better understanding of beliefs and desires, and for identifying what each person knows and needs to live.

Breaking out of the hierarchy of knowledge

Endogenous knowledge would seem to be a starting point to explore, because the idea behind pedagogy for me is to start with the learners and help them to progress according to their own needs, based on where they are and not on solutions that I imagine to be good for them.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen points out that it's important not simply to give people the resources to act, but to transform these resources into effective capacity for action. Amartya talks about capabilities. The skills to be identified as a priority seem to me to be learning, transmitting, supporting and training. Are they present in craftsmen, women, community leaders? Traditional authorities? I think it's important to involve educators, masters and those with traditional knowledge.

How can we restore value to endogenous knowledge and its local holders?

We probably need to invent rituals, brotherhoods and associations, document this knowledge on websites (an opportunity to train local people in computer skills on a concrete object), produce reports, films and audio recordings to express pride.

Sometimes we need reference figures to project ourselves.Unesco has also worked to recognize master craftsmen around the world, in Japan, France and a variety of other countries.

Sharing and blending knowledgefor the benefit of local projects

Gradually, the multiplicity of ideas indicated in my answers is creating a humus that fosters the desire to learn and, above all, shows the links between learning, innovation and entrepreneurship. It takes time to build forward-looking relationships with knowledge.

Building a learning region in practice

1. Get into the hearts of local people, make contact, get a feel for them, breathe in the atmosphere, listen, ask questions, get a feel for them and maybe even understand them.
   
   
2. Identify a few promising initiatives, multiply trial-and-error successes, even small ones (I prefer this to trial-and-error), understand in small steps what works to create a common ground, a network of motivated players.
   
   
3. When enough allies have been identified, after a series of workshops and retreats, propose a "call for challenges", asking those with projects, ideas and desires to take the plunge, and providing methodological support to help them move forward. These could be public policy challenges on the scale of a street, a garden or a profession. At this stage, it's important not to put too much pressure on the success or failure of the challenge, but rather to encourage people to work together, to start telling a story, and to "learn to learn together".
   
   
4. Organize reflective periods to see how the area has reacted, and operate reflective loops to improve the intervention system and, in the process, increase the training of those involved in the challenges. Continue to take up challenges, using cultural resources to stir hearts.
   
   
5. Continue to enrich the pool of players by bringing in new players to achieve a leverage effect, involve researchers to show the challenge being met(Hawthorn effect ), communicate throughout the process.
   
   
6. At some point, support the creation by local residents themselves of a space - a hall or training center, a branch of an association or university (depending on local needs) - to symbolically house the process, and identify the economic model for this space.
   
   

Sources

Geoffroy, F. (2019). Is there a Hawthorne effect? Annales des Mines - Gérer et comprendre, 135, 42-52.
https://doi.org/10.3917/geco1.135.0042

RERS https://www.rers-asso.org/qu-est-ce-que-les-rers.htm

ANMFR (Association Nationale des Maisons Familiales Rurales) - Fédération des Organisations Non-Gouvernementales du Sénégal www.fongs.sn/spip.php?rubrique58

Cristol. D (2019) La pédagogie des défis territoriaux - le design appliqué aux politiques publiques: retours d'expérience et perspectives pour demain. Assises du Design - Le design appliqué aux politiques publiques, Oct 2019, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02290122⟩ https://hal.science/hal-02290122#:~:text=C%27est%20une%20démarche%20expérimentale%20visant%20la%20facilitation%20du,peut%20pas%20changer%20à%20lui%20seul%20les%20pratiques.

Insight share https://insightshare.org/about

Traditional craftsmanship - intangible heritage - Culture Sector - UNESCO
https://ich.unesco.org/fr/artisanat-traditionnel-00057

The European University of Territorial Public Innovation 2019
https://universiteinnovationpublique.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/revoir-les-differentes-conferences/