by Nick Eastmond
February 2000
Jan Visser Wins ETRD Award
Q1:What two to three key experiences
in your background led you to develop your current theory?
Learning Without Frontiers, or the
idea of caring for the integrity, completeness and comprehensiveness
of the learning environment, is not a theory. I would rather call
it a vision. It’s a vision based on the consideration that
learning is something every human being has a right to engage
in at any time in his or her life. It is also based on the notion
that there is an intimate relationship between learning, change,
and growth and that therefore learning is a prime condition for
human and social development. Obviously, that vision is underpinned
by many things we know, some of which are embedded in larger theoretical
frameworks. We know, for instance, that learning is not the privilege
of the young, but that everybody, at any age, can learn. We also
know, thanks to the development of the instructional design field,
what to do when we want people to accomplish particular learning
tasks. We don’t know very well yet, though, how to handle
the larger question of creating the overall societal conditions
that best allow people to take charge of their own learning the
way they like to do it.
Right as we are talking, I am greatly
concerned with and appalled by the case of a guy in Mozambique
who, because of the conditions that prevailed in his country at
the time he should have finished secondary school, could not do
so. He was in senior secondary school at the time the country
became independent from Portugal. Following independence, most
Portuguese teachers decided to leave the country. It became virtually
impossible to run the school system. Thus, the new government
decided to suspend the two upper grades of secondary education.
Portugal having done little to create the human resource base
necessary to run Mozambique independently, young Mozambicans,
trained or untrained, were called upon to take over the role of
the departing Portuguese cadres. The person I am talking about,
who involuntarily could not complete his secondary education,
became director of a school in one of the Northern provinces of
Mozambique. I met him later, when he was transferred back to the
capital city Maputo where, at the time (early nineteen eighties),
we were setting up Mozambique’s first post-independence
distance education system, to which I was the principal adviser.
He became part of the team of people involved. This was the time
the country was in deep trouble because of an evolving civil war,
but I've always been impressed by the tough dedication of my Mozambican
colleagues. Work went on even in the hardest of circumstances.
Conditions have improved since and the man I am talking about
has now established a flourishing practice as independent consultant,
working both nationally and internationally. How has he learned
his trade? Well, simply by doing. But society expects more than
just competence. It also wants to see it certified and documented.
So, he enrolled in the external degree program of the University
of London and is about to complete a Master’s Degree. He
even wants to go on and has applied for admission into the Ph.D.
program in instructional design at a renowned State University
in the US. In preparation for it he did his GRE and TOEFL, passing
both with very good results. Yet, the answer he just got back
from the admissions office states that, as things stand, he cannot
be admitted. We accept a master's degree from the U.K. only if
admission to that master's program required the completion of
a bachelor's degree. He doesn’t have it and he does not
have a secondary school diploma either. The University of London’s
external degree program has an open admission policy, valuing
process and output rather than input.
The above case is that of one person.
Unfortunately, the case doesn’t stand on its own. Fortunately,
the person of my example is unlikely to give up easily and may
eventually be successful in turning the bureaucratic system around.
But the case shows the tremendous barriers that are often put
in the way of individuals who aspire to learn.
My other case is a generic one. There
are some 900 million illiterate people in this world. They, like
anyone else, have a desire to learn. However, we keep telling
them that they can only do so if they first become literate. I’m
not saying that it is not a noble goal to make people literate.
Of course it is. But it is not noble to ignore that exceptional
feats of learning take place among the illiterate. I met hordes
of them during my 25 years of development work in Africa. There
is a lot you can learn from them. We, who master the alphanumeric
symbol system, can learn a lot from people who are conversant
with totally different symbol systems. They can also learn from
us. But there are artificial barriers between us and them that
prevent such learning from taking place. While directing the Learning
Without Frontiers effort in UNESCO, one of my colleagues in Central
America, Juan Chong, an exceptionally enterprising and creative
person who collaborated with us, showed that it is possible to
develop learning packages to help illiterate people learn the
things they want to learn without making them literate first.
It’s not hard at all. It just requires a bit of vision and
the willingness to row against the stream.
When my father asked my mother if she
would marry him, she said no. My father was a sailor at the time
and she didn’t want to marry a sailor. So, my father decided
he would change course and go to university. He hadn’t gone
to secondary school, though, so he first had to take evening classes
to get his secondary school diploma. Then he entered university.
Combining study and work, he completed everything according to
the book. As a child, I had the permanent example of someone who
was always learning. When we, the kids, were meanwhile in secondary
school and studied subjects, such as the French language, my mother
had never studied, she decided to take French classes. These are
examples that showed me at an early age that learning is something
you just do. You don’t wait till someone tells you.
I would probably not have been who
I am and I would not have valued learning the way I value it now,
had I not had such examples. I might not have envisioned Learning
Without Frontiers the way I do, had it not been for the kind of
experiences I just mentioned.
Q2: How have you been involved with
UNESCO in developing it?
My involvement with UNESCO in developing
Learning Without Frontiers was, in a sense, accidental. I had
been working with UNESCO for four years, directing its various
operations in Southern Africa, heading up the subregional office
in Harare, Zimbabwe. At the end of 1993, I was transferred to
Headquarters in Paris, France, to become director of an environmental
education program. Because of a couple of internal hiccups in
the Organization, this did not materialize. Meanwhile, an initiative
had been suggested by an ad hoc advisory committee to create a
program with the name Learning Without Frontiers. Little detail
was contained in the advice given, but I happen, at one time,
somewhere in the middle of 1994, to have been asked by the Director-General
to take part in a meeting on the initiative, which he chaired.
I made some critical noises, which I thought would have made this
my last meeting on this subject. The opposite happened. I was
charged with the development of the program and later given the
task to direct it.
Q3. What led to your collaboration
with David Berg?
Learning Without Frontiers started
against all odds. A program of this kind didn’t fit very
well in the mainstream of UNESCO’s work. So, we had little
support, financially and in terms of human resources. Besides,
few people inside UNESCO had the kind of profile that would qualify
them for an innovative effort such as Learning Without Frontiers.
I thus had to look outside UNESCO and bring in people with external
financing who would have the right profile. David was one of them.
He had been working for a number of years in the Middle East for
the World Health Organization when we first met. There were more
people on our team, which was made up of different nationalities.
We all worked very well together and we all worked very hard.
We had a great time together. Most of us continue to collaborate
beyond our UNESCO existence.
Q4: What events have transpired
since you wrote the article? How would those affect your
present position on these matters?
The most visible event is perhaps that
I have since left UNESCO and that, of the old team, many of its
members have since gone out into the world as well, some within
the UNESCO context, others outside of it. All of us continue to
work on the Learning Without Frontiers vision, making it a reality
in different settings. The fact that we dissolved ourselves should
be seen as a natural consequence of how we were motivating each
other. None of us saw Learning Without Frontiers as I yet another
UNESCO program, a something that should stay in UNESCO or have
a clear UNESCO label. In fact, I decided early on that 'Learning
Without Frontiers' would be a non-proprietary concept. We, the
Learning Without Frontiers team members, were all very much aware
that you can effectively work on such a program within an organization
like UNESCO only as long as the conditions are there. We knew
that would be the case for a couple of years, but not necessarily
much longer. So, we had deliberately given ourselves a timeframe
of four years to put the dynamics of the program in place. That
was all we wanted and I think we have done so successfully. We
have had more influence with our ideas outside UNESCO than inside
UNESCO, but I don’t see that as a problem. UNESCO deserves
credit to have allowed us to work on some pretty impossible things.
My own work is now focusing on developing
the Learning Development Institute (LDI). When I felt, already
more than two years ago, that in UNESCO we were reaching the limits
of what could be done, I discussed with the Director General the
idea to create an institute outside UNESCO that would collaborate
with the Organization without being hampered by the shortcomings
that a large intergovernmental bureaucracy almost by necessity
has. He agreed. That thus is what I am doing now. LDI is, as far
as I am concerned, the successor to Learning Without Frontiers
as an organizational unit in UNESCO. It is driven by the same
ideas, as you can see when you check out the LDI Web site at http://www.learndev.org.
Q5: What trends do you see on the
horizon that our international readers should be aware of?
I think the whole learning equation
is now presenting itself in an entirely different perspective.
Few people who are in their right state of mind would still consider
the school system as the only, or even major, response to society’s
learning needs. There is growing awareness that the learning environment
must be conceived of as something enormously more complex and
that the different components of the learning environment - the
school; the family; the street; the media; the workplace; libraries;
museums; the Internet; etc. - are all organically interdependent.
The problem we are facing is that ideas develop faster than practice
can change. That will be cause for some tension. But it is a necessary
tension. Without it there will be no progress. And time is running
out. The problems of today’s world are enormous. They can
only be solved with the involvement of all. But we can’t
solve problems if we don’t learn. That’s why.
Q6: What additional thoughts would
you like to add?
I think there is a great need now for
collaboration and for learning together. Thanks to the new ways
in which we communicate with each other, travel around the globe,
and are aware of each other’s existence, the world has,
perceptually, become much smaller. At the same time, ever more
people inhabit this tiny planet and the processes of interaction
they create become ever more complex. The time that it was possible
to govern nations and the world in a centralized manner has gone
for good. More than 50 years ago, an organization like UNESCO
could still be thought of as the single most important agency
for international development in its particular fields of competence.
If the same attitude prevailed today, not only as regards UNESCO,
but any such organization, it would be disastrous. Now, the best
any such organization can do is in the first place to visualize
itself as a learning organization. In the second place, while
adopting an organizational learning behavior, it should look around
for others who are similarly interested in the processes that
pertain to its own mandate. Having identified such opportunities,
you then have to focus on mechanisms to work together and support
each other’s work. Networking is the name of the game. Its
implications are not just organizational. It’s in the first
place a matter of attitudes. In Learning Without Frontiers we
were particularly focusing on these connections.
Q7: What questions would you ask
of our readers? What challenge(s) would you like to pass
along to them?
In the spirit of what I just said about
working and learning together, it is appropriate to raise the
issue of solidarity. We live in a world of incredible discrepancies
in opportunities to learn and with a great diversity of barriers
that hamper or block people from taking advantage of such opportunities.
It requires the involvement of many to realize a vision such as
Learning Without Frontiers. The challenge to redefine the learning
landscape is still very new. It is best undertaken simultaneously
on multiple fronts rather than by trying to work incrementally.
I see it as a particular challenge for the International Council
to generate such solidarity and the spirit to cooperate across
geo-political boundaries among AECT’s membership (not just
those who identify with the International Council, but AECT at
large). Obviously, I’ll be happy to interact with readers
of the newsletter who want to face the challenge. I can be reached
at jvisser@learndev.org.
