Note: The purpose of this text is to provide an overview exploration to the needs for omnicultural approaches to holistic learning in the 21st Century. If we want to be successful in meeting the global challenges of the 21st Century, if we want to continue on the course (set by the UN declarations and charters on rights and balanced societies in tune with the eco-social frameworks of the biosphere) towards a global, peaceful, just and sustainable civilisation - a massive paradigm shift is needed.

Albert Einstein said that "problems cannot be created with the same thinking that created them" and he is right. The industrial countries have created vast problems globally, diminishing biodiversity and setting off balance planetary life systems to the point of threatening the continuation of civilisation as we know it, maybe even the survival of the human species.

Their own efforts for turning the industrial Titanic away from the waterfall are rather fruitless. Instead, industrial societies are accelerating pace on their path towards negative future scenarios. On the other hand, much positive innovation is integrated from "other", traditional, sustainable cultures! Logically, advice and learning from "other, more sustainable cultures" for decision-makers on all levels, for earth-literate leadership (UNESCO), and for nurturing Fair Global Citizens and Fair Consumers.

This needs to be better acknowledged, and the sources must be kept alive and nurtured, must be protected from the bull-dozers and cultural invasion. And their competences and basic wisdom for eco-socially functional societies needs to be

In order to create an understanding of the bigger picture, this text aims at providing an overview and insights to the dysfunctionality of the conventional, one-sided approach to solving the problems by the industrial nations. I am addressing the underlying aspects of decision-making and behaviour: worldview and ethical values. I am also addressing that the mindset of the "Culture of Unsustainability" is far more spread than the general understanding about development, G8 nations etc. implies. I am also giving some hints and examples of where other cultures can help us, hurdles on this path, and practical examples of learning programs already applied in schools.

This is little trodden territory in the academic world. From my point of view, it would require a book to achieve a satisfactory, comprehensive approach to this vital issue. Condensed to the size and format of INST, this text is an attention riser, a step to the door leading towards Old & New Learning for a Culture of Sustainability. The UPDATES page shall treat this matter more deeply.

Introduction

The foremost priority of the 21st Century is the quest for sustainability. This text is looking at culture and learning from this perspective.

Future! Today, this means the disintegration or the conservation of the web of life, oceans, the atmosphere, the earth we live from. The coming decades challenge us with an uncontrollable reduction of food production, energy resources, industrial production" , a global catastrophe with billions of victims cannot be ruled out any longer. The technical solutions and financial resources are all at hand, but nothing significant is being done. Sustainability shows to be much more than an eco-technological repair program - the reasons for the worldwide destruction of life supporting resources are rooted in our disfunctional understanding of the world, the unseen aspects of culture: worldview, consciousness, ethics!

The unseen aspects of the Culture of Unsustainbility ... every cell of the urban indutstrial societies of the planet. This important issue is hardly mentioned but will decide whether we will experience within our life-time a functional global civilization, or "global death".

The necessary paradigm shift is already taking place on all levels of society. Yet, four lost decades have painfully taught us that the urbanindustrial societies are unable to develop effective alternatives, aims and solutions from within. This is why this text also explores the potentials of omnicultural learning environments.

The path towards a functional society demands a fundamental change of our understanding of the world and interrelationships. The carrier of such new understanding must be the inner- and outer school education sector.

EDUCATION AND UN- / SUSTAINABILITY

"The spectre now facing humanity is the extinction rather than the enrichment of life. Therefore, the starting point for reconceptualizing the knowledge society is to identify life-supporting principles for human behaviour. These are now available to us from the science of ecology. One part of our task is to make human beings ecoliterate."

Earth-literate leaders and Fair Global Citizens are key elements of functional global civilization. Consequently, the function of the education system shifts towards qualifying youth and citizens for the participation in na global, free, democratic society of sustainability principles. It is urgent to provide youth with tools and spaces for ...

i) learning to live economically, politically, socially and culturally responsible.
ii) learning to stand by their words, to say what they mean and rnean what they say.
iii) learning to actively participate as citizens for cocreating society in an economically, politically, socially and culturally responsible manner.

The course for this paradigm change in education is set: January 1st 2005 marks the beginning of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. UNESCO offers a 125 page ESD Toolkit which helps teachers in introducing meaningful and relevant dimensions into schools. The new learning process helps students recognize global priorities, locate themselves in the frame of globalization and empower themselves for participating in a meaningful development of society on personal and local level.

An important competence for the active participation in the quest for sustainability is an understanding of the complex network of actors involved in the shaping of society. Therefore, an integral part of class-room activities is active and interdisciplinary projecteering within the societal network of administration and civil society organisations, - with positive effect on the common reality. So, - a completely different "schooling" from what we have experienced. Unfortunately, 90% of teachers are netiher aware nor competent enough for such learning processes. A fact that owes to the fact that teachers do not perceive their role as societally responsible. This is just as true for higher learning institutions. The way towards sustainability is a long one, and it demands a mobile pedagogical mind!



"From teaching to learning": self-guided, co-creative, explorative.

A change of

(01) Format: from information transfer to learning processes.
(02) Teacher role: from teacher-centered top-down to co-creative, participatory, self-guided learning, - the teacher has the role of a learning-coach.
(03) Content: from artificial content to practical relevance integrating the world outside the school fence.
(04) Perspective: from one-dimensional specialist knowledge to interdisciplinary competence in global context, change of perspective.
(05) Providing thematic overview and qualifying for individual deepening after school hours.
(06) Cognitive quality: from LOCS Lower Order Cognitive Skills to HOCS Higher Order Cognitive Skills.
(07) Learning partnerships: Cooperation with competences outside school, - civil society and individuals.
(08) Leanspaces: integration of learnspaces beyond the school fence.
(09) Societal relevance: meaningful themes of practical relevance.
(10) Aim: Qualification for Fair Global Citizenship.
(11) Meaningful use of the new media as Netizen - Citizen
(12) Awareness, understanding, responsibility: teachers are appointed by society to educate the young generation for succesfully facing the challenge of our times: the development of a sustainable, peaceful global civilization implementing the global agreements embodied in the United Nations and the Earth Charter.



Education means integration and change of public spaceS

Global Sustainability Education means integrating the real world outside the school fence, co-creating and re-animating it. The best approach is to become "seeds of change" and producing "positive news ". Two examples of inner- and outer-school education illustrate the potentials:

International School Peace Gardens (ISPG) is a UNA Canada Millenium Global Sustainability Education best practice project, that combines education principles in peace, conflict resolution and ecology. The universality of the ISPG Curriculum unites schools, parents, civil society, administration and politics for interdisciplinary projecteering - initiated by the children / students. A special trait of ISPG is the fact that the resulting School Peace Garden serves as a long-term forum for peace and sustainability issues. It is used for class, cultural and private activities. It initiates many holistic GSE-sustainability activities, varying on local priorities and the specific setting of the school community, including river-, mountain-, rainforest-, arctic and marine environments, even post-conflict regions. In cooperation with international science institutes and regional competences the children develop an idea of the general issue, practical on-site projecteering and media work. Finally, the local experience is taken to the global perspective by integrating UNESCO's views on "A Culture of Peace through Tourism", which helps children transfer their local experience to global horizons and developing respect for the ecological, social and cultural treasures of places they visit while visiting other parts of the world. An understanding also formulated in the idea of Fair Travel .

The youth sector holds amazing potentials for opening GSE learning horizons that can hardly be realized within the school frame. An example for a long-term public space project is the "future-raft" - a swimming future class-room. The 70 square metre recycling-raft was concipated as a participatory work of art (INtegrated ART). During the universal world exposition expo2000 it developed into a popular meeting-point for creative international youth. In relaxed-excited-inspired atmosphere, artists, spirituals, scientists, politics and children collected, discussed and presented strategies and solutions for sustainability from all over the world. The media popularity of the colourful project inspired for a waterway-tour to Berlin on occasion of the UN World Summit for Sustainability in Johannesburg 2002. On a six week waterway-tour covering more than 350 kilometers, youth groups connected to regional Agenda21 actors for developing illustrated "Treasure Maps" featuring sustainability projects and actors of the region. These were exhibited on a number of major events along the way and on the internet. Consecutively, the future-raft was supposed to be established as a Swimming Future-Classroom on Berlin's River Spree, to form the missing link between the city's NGOs and schools, but a criminal fire-attack burnt and sunk the raft before it could go into action.


Truly, we are witnessing a re-orientation of the public education sector, but the above-mentioned scientific-cognitive innovation does not suffice, as long as there is no consciousness and conviction for meaningful action in global context.

It is evident that the unsustainable urban-industrial societies hold few significant traits of the unseen aspects of the Culture of Sustainability. But other societies do! Many "others" are succesful in solving the key issues of the century - sustainability and community! This is reason enough for expanding conventional schooling horizons to learning from and with the people living and nurturing a Culture of Sustainability: traditional cultures.

Since the Sixties, access to new perspectives in science has been slowly growing. In this process, academics with indigenous roots have been working on "decolonizing the mind". "Post-colonial education" contrasts traditional indigenous worldview with European cognitive influence and develops alternative teaching models. The indigenous perspective facilitates taking an outside look at the cognitive labyrinth that the unsustainable societies are trapped in, because we can make out and re-evaluate urban human patterns of tought and behaviour that are mistaken as evident, normal or even natural, - like ego-ism, competition, greed, dominance, racism, aggression, inequality, survival of the fittest, or the idea that human beings were naturally evil, or guilty, or anti-social, or clever or superior.

Diversity, Unity, Orientation, Location and Finding with the Compass of Wholeness are central innovations that science urgently requires, in order to bridge the void of the meaningless information society towards a knowledge society. This is a case also for new mental models and knowledge architecture facilitating overview and cohesion, - something that cybernetics is concerned with. An example for innovation in science is the Integrated Sciences -course at the University College of Cape Breton in Canada. In cooperation with the Micmac-Nation, students learn to understand the conventionally divided sciences in a holitic manner.


Examples of omnicultural learning environments

Youth have shown in a multi-year undertaking that the orientation at other cultures, philosophies and societies helps us towards layouting functional, sustainable societies. The group set out to build a "World House" embracing all people of the world, and undertook an expedition to dozens of philosophies. Their journey, thoughts and decision processes are retold from youth perspective in a remarkably rich book, that "... provides all interested people with an understanding of the thought models of our world - and guides the reader to finding his/her own viewpoint in a world scenario that is becoming more complex by the day" and furthermore "formulates a holistic worldview which is anything but unworldly! If this book can influence the thinking and decision-making of its readers just a little bit then it is another step towards a sustainable society." - a must for every bookshelf!

The Welthaus-project indicates a fundamental need for learning in the 21st Century: the looking at abstract realities as "culture", "futures" and "sustainability" in "mental rooms and spaces or models". This helpful mental crutch helps us get a grip on the abstract interrelations in our fast-changing world by making them tangible, - a "House of Horizons and Perspectives, Proportions and Consequences" quickly turns into a "House of Eyes" when the question arises "Where am I? What am I learning? In which areas and cultures? Before what time horizon? Am I looking through a shaded lens? Do I have blinders on? Where and when do I look through a worm-, fish-, bird's-, group-, culture- and epoch-eye? And how do the others see? "

The ideas of mental architecture and KnowledgeScapes lead us towards conclusions about co-explorative and co-modelling LearnScapes. These are known as out of school Learning environments as experimental museums, but still unexplored in 3d-Virtual Reality environments. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci, Antoni Gaudí, Albert Einstein or Buckminster Fuller apply 21st Century electronic media to share with us, children and university students worldwide their inner world of imagination, their understanding of multicomplex interrelations in time and space horizons. There lies potential for extraordinary solutions in using Virtual Reality for making tangible, comprehensible and overview-able such distant, multicomplex and abstract realities as culture, globalisation, ethical values or sustainability.

Culture must not be forced into the distorted urban-ethnological corset of a text. Culture has a living face, voice and hands. An approach to representing it can have the form of a blooming LearnScape, with freely explorable resources, Interviews and media. Online multimedia applications offer a variety of opportunities for collaboration and co-creation of the LearnScape, for co-modellation in a virtual garden of Sculptures of Meaning . In order to integrate the GSE attributes "global, authentic, alive and applicable", this virtual reality LearnScape has to be created from reality but also reach into reality - through direct links to traditional authorities, culture centres, schools, youth organisations, travel destinations and more.

"Oceanie" is an example of an explorative online-world. This multimedia online presentation about the island cultures of Oceania was developed in collaboration between traditionals and the Museum of Civilizations of Canada. The presentation has some very interesting elements like the contextual arrangement of knowledge, but - like so many western cultural products - it is static and has no participatory elements. An approach to overcome such shortcomings is the CultureChannel of the World Future School project - an omnicultural online learning environment: global, interactive and participative. Each culture receives an online space, - a Culture Kaleidoscope - to be filled and illustrated with varous seen and unseen aspects of culture. These spaces have no limit in space, diversity, form and creativity. Learners can explore these spaces individually or in a group, dive into media or interviews, connect to persons and institutions. They can get involved creatively, for example by developing additional Kaleidoscope elements in cooperation with "cultural personalities". Culturally active groups can even become part of the Kaleidoscope, invite school-groups for communication and exchange. By addressing yulture in a holistic manner, - including travel, democratic support and sustainability cooperation - this virtualk learning and encounter environment reaches out into reality, in the sense of a New Agora . By integrating Netizenship and Openspace-online-conferences it may even develop into an experimental environment for re-inventing democracy .

FINISH AND OUTLOOK

Some puzzle pieces and orientation marks for a Culture of Sustainability have been indicated, there are many more!

Key interest of the author is the advancement of cultural learning through the realisation of an omnicultural dialogue environment for application in the global education system. This resource shall offer the conventional standards of intercultural education, and additional facilities for developing an understanding of depth and breadth of culture, as well as its implications for our immediate futures. Furthermore, access to authentic cultural encounter and effective measures for the conservation of cultural diversity and fertility of humankind. The "Futures of Education Forum" of the World Future School project presents resources for education and learning on the tidal wave of our times.

Interested individuals and groups from Schools, Alternative and Higher Education, Culture and Sustainability are invited to add and cooperate. Contact: Eric Schneider, eric@worldfutureschool.org.

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