Rickety Bridge

Please note: I’m busy moving blogs, and copied this content over. The image links are going to break, if they haven’t already. It is what it is.

 

The transcript of the talk I gave at the SA Geography teachers conference, on 24 September 2014.

The title, roughly, is Permaculture, water and the landscape: the connectedness of things

The attendees made for a lovely audience, so much laughing in all the right places that I got totally overexcited. 🙂 I’m not quite happy with the structure and content of this talk yet, but I think it’s starting to get there. (As a point aside, I think I should make a talk that gets into the nitty gritty of Permaculture, water and the landscape, but first, I need to write 3x 4000-6000 word essays on the PhD… sigh) Also, this was the first talk where my special person was in the audience. That was … different.

When I was building this talk, I thought, I work in sewage, and this is a dinner time talk, so…that’s not going to work. I also thought you, as geographers, probably know more about water and the landscape than I do. You probably also had a long day, and I don’t want to exhaust you further with more technical stuff.

To be honest I just put this slide in everywhere because I love it so much, but to give it some place here, this is a rather random talk, some things may be too technical for you, some things may be too general, some too soft and mushy, some too hard… Take what you like from it, and just sit back for the rest. The talk will be online, so you can dip into it whenever you want to again. I learnt about constructivist learning approaches this week, that really appeals to me, so I would like you to build this learning with me.

To read the quote, it’s a Bruce Lee quote, but I can’t do the voice, so bear with me:

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend.

It’s a bit weird for me to be here, I’m not a geographer, I don’t even really know what it is, I’m not a teacher, even though I’m learning to be one, I’m on a course! So the web says you all learn about everything on the earth (laughter). I can relate to that, that’s cool.

So I didn’t want to talk about sewage, and then I thought, what is the big thing that I want to talk about? I can tell you about that we have too much dirty water, that our stormwater causes too much flooding because our cities are paved over. That we have a flush and forget, out of sight out of mind mentality where it comes to wastes. That we struggle to manage manure at feedlots at the same time as we struggle to fertilise and nourish our fields. We all know these things, I don’t want to bore you with it.

Now, as engineers and scientists, we like to identify the issue and then address it. I think it’s important to communicate it too. So I’ll follow this approach tonight, but as useful as this is, it causes a lot of specialisation, and creates these silo’s of knowledge, so I want to give one other approach before I dive in.

This quote is by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and I go through these phases where my thinking pulls a lot from the Little Prince, so I apologise, I got a bit carried away with all the pictures… anyways, this quote sums it up.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work (of course, this is important, to organise teams and so on, but it’s not the only thing), but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

So, what’s my big issue? Well, here’s another quote from the little prince. The fox says, you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. And we have tamed our environment. But this is not the whole issue. Here’s another quote, from Bruno Latour, and I learnt a new word – post-environmentalism! I’m a post-environmentalist. Actually, my engineering friends think I’m a hippie and my hippie friends think I’m a capitalist, but hey. Here’s the quote:

Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather than he abandoned the creature to itself.

We create monsters. It happens. But we need to take responsibility for them. And I think a lot of the environmental and other challenges we have now is not that much because we created the circumstances for them, but that we then abandoned them.

For me, the big issue is this: Tame is not sustainable.

When I finished this talk and sent it off to Bridget, and went home, I suddenly thought, oh my God, they’re going to think I’m talking about anarchy. I’m not. Tame and wild is not like order and chaos. To me, tame is disconnected, subdued. Wild is connected, an ecosystem. Community. We do not know ourselves and our interactions with the wider world anymore. This quote by Ian McCallum sums it up – to understand wildness is to discover the thread that binds us to all living things.

I guess it’s a different way of identifying the issue, and now that we have, the really tricky thing is to communicate it. We are trying to bring many very different minds together to talk to each other, and that’s really hard. I want to share with you two approaches that I think does very well at achieving bringing people together to learn in a fun way. The first is biomimicry. It is a design tool: I don’t think it does particularly well at actually addressing challenges, so I think that needs to be kept in mind, but as a design and educational tool, it’s fantastic. The website has excellent resources and a lot of them are free:

biomimicrysa.co.za

http://biomimicry.net/about/biomimicry/biomimicry-designlens/

Biomimicry has six principles, and Permaculture has 12 principles, which I’ll get to in a moment. These principles help a lot to get your mind around things and iteratively develop solutions to them. They are also very helpful to get people out of their areas of technical jargon, they get to play together in a neutral space.

(I did not go into the principles during the talk as the audience was tired and I thought not really in the space to pay attention, they seemed to want a quick laugh, dessert and then a bed…)

Biomimicry’s six principles:

• Adapt to changing conditions
• Be locally attuned and responsive
• Use life-friendly chemistry
• Be resource efficient (materials and energy)
• Integrate development with growth
• Evolve to survive

Permaculture is the conscious design of human living environments that reflect the ecological principle that underlies nature.

I think Permaculture does a good job of communicating the issues, as well as addressing them. Perhaps more in the organic sphere, land restoration and food production, for example, but the principles can be used in any setting (some more metaphorically speaking than others).

Permaculture principles: (permacultureprinciples.com/resources/free-downloads/)

1. Observe and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
6. Produce no waste
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small and slow solutions
10. Use and value diversity
11. Use edges and value the marginal
12. Creatively use and respond to change.

I want to particularly highlight the eleventh principle – Use edges and value the marginal.

It’s the things on the edges that innovate because they have to, because if they don’t, they die. At the edges you also get to interact with other things, cross the boundaries, which allows you to make connections that may not have been possible before.

What we have move to the margins is our waste, so I want to take the last part of the talk and focus on how to address this big issue in terms of waste, and the work that we do.

Biomimicry considers that nature knows no waste. Permaculture says a waste is simply a resource that is out of place, that we can innovate and make valuable again. Even OMO gets in on the action, and says, waste is good (I’m paraphrasing).

At CeBER, the Centre for Bioprocessing Engineering Research, we look at how these things fit together, what we can make from wastes using biology, and also what that means in terms of economics, and if it fits well in the bigger picture, if it is really good for the environment and so on.

I didn’t know how much technical stuff you want so I just put in the introduction pictures, but please feel free to ask questions at any level of technicality.

The Biominerals group is our largest group and the best funded (and sometimes with the ego to match). They use bugs to treat mine wastewater, but also to mine low grade ores, mainly for copper, but also for zinc and gold. They do great work, they’re really brilliant.

One of the main research areas in CeBER is bioleaching, a process where microbes are used as biocatalysts to convert metal compounds into their soluble forms. This leaching process is an alternative economical method for the recovery of metals such as copper, zinc and gold from low-grade mineral ores, with low investment and operation costs.

The Algae group is the PR face of CeBER: all our press photos have algae group pictures in, and the most beautiful people work in this group. It’s true. This group looks at if algae is all it’s cracked up to be, it started with the hype around biomass to fuels, and looked at if it made economical sense – it can’t, and now we look at ways to supplement the economics with higher-value products like carotenoids and nutraceuticals. This group also looks at the whole ecosystem and if it makes environmental sense.

CeBER focuses on algal cultivation, harvesting and processing for the production of carotenoids, nutraceuticals, lipds and energy products. Maximising lipid productivity through optimising the uptake of light and CO2 is critical to systems scale-up. Through the biorefinery concept, inventory analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). we identify key contributions required for feasible algal processes.

And then there’s me. I learn from the biominerals group who work with the very dilute mining waters, and the algae group who knows about biorefineries, and I try to bring them together, to create value from a range of wastewaters – my passion being municipal wastewater. I found this beautiful quote at the last conference in Spain this year, which was very exciting as more and more people are now getting the hang of this thing. That does make me feel a bit odd because now it feels that I’m moving away from the edge, so I have to do something to keep the edge!

A biorefinery is characterised as an explicitly integrative, multifunctional overall concept that uses biomass as a diverse source of raw materials for the sustainable generation of a spectrum of different intermediates and products (chemicals, materials and/or bioenergy/fuel) whilst including the fullest possible use of all raw material components – EU definition, presented at RRB2014 by Timoteo de la Fuente.

This is really important, as the first ‘biorefineries’ were all about taking one raw material, say the crops that were taking the space for our food, and turning it into fuel, and that was not working well at all. These biorefineries now start to approach much more of an ecosystem, and I think that is really moving in the right direction.

I want to end with coming back to that longing for the sea. I spent a lot of time fighting and trying to figure out how to make this world better. We are in a tough spot, a lot of things are not going well, and it is easy to get despondent.

Then I found this word, jouissance. It means physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy, and comes from the French word jouir, for “enjoy”.

I’m not sure if I should say this, but I’m going to anyway. This word also has links to orgasm (roars of laughter which made me feel quite goofy), … and I think that’s epic.

I first came across jouissance in a book written about capitalism (Capitalism’s New Clothes – Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis), of all things, in which Colin Cremin describes it as follows:

… a brief flash of enjoyment (more roars of laughter, making me very happy 🙂 ) achieved after excessive pursuit (a few giggles). The pleasure lies in the obstacles to fulfillment – but only if that fulfillment eventually arrives, and only if there are obstacles.

In our search for tameness and control, we want everything to always flow smoothly, but that robs us of jouissance. On the other hand, the fact that so many things are changing so fast is not such a bad thing. So I want to implore you to embrace a bit of wildness, in these interesting times. We need to work hard to make things better, but celebrate those small wins, have some brief flashes of enjoyment. This way, we would get further, and have more fun.

And that’s it! Thank you for your kind attention.

*** The talk after mine was by Carin De Villiers on SA’s Alternatives to Coal, and can be found here (1.5MB).

 

 

 

 

 

Hello world, for sankey

This page is me brushing up my sankey skills. Going to try get something very basic up and then improve it from there… It’s the sandbox. 🙂

Three hours later … can’t seem to upload .json files without (I’m assuming) paying money. Think I need to go host a wordpress with someone like Hetzner. So I’m back to sorting out my original blog so I don’t have to pay twice. Bugger.

A day later, while I wait for all the stuff to get sorted, tried leaving the .json file on DropBox and see if the links work, for now… well, the link may work, but the wordpress just takes all the html stuff out. No Sankey.

PhD Acknowledgements

This PhD represents growing up at many levels, and is a culmination of a lifelong (so far) struggle, driven by frustration. A struggle to figure out what I wanted, and once I knew that what I wanted was a biotech company, a struggle to figure out what that meant.

Thanks to the fat Maltese cross and the vet who gave me a vac job and operating room nausea in 2000 who saved me from veterinary service.

Thanks to Colin Kenyon and the ladies at the CSIR. When things unravel I always think back at those times and remember what a good lab must be like. Thanks to the people at the Water Institute of South Africa (WISA), whose discussions helped me shape my own approach, including my own little lab – called ‘Dave’s kitchen’ after Dave Crombie who said if it can’t work in your kitchen, don’t bother out in the field (or in academia).

Thanks to the Commonwealth Scholarships, for funding my adventures to England where I met Sue Harrison. After all this time and all the research and networking, this is still the best place for me.  Figures that you have to go travel all over to meet your destiny, which is back home.

My entire life has been an unintended study in the unconventional. It’s ironic that this phase of my life concludes in such a comparatively conventional and rigorous thing as an engineering PhD. I was not happy in Cape Town, at UCT or in Engineering, but I have not found a place I rather need to be – and believe me, I looked. Now, that the worst is over and I have worked out a way to be both outside and within, I’m quite happy here. I guess I had to prove that if my crazy ideas were to work at all, they should work in such a constrained environment.

Thanks to the dude at the castle in 2006 for asking me how I feel about the inequality in South Africa. You coloured how I make my choices.

To the organisers of the second Renewable Resources and Biorefineries (RRB) conference held in York, 2006. I cut my Euro-trip, for which I saved an entire year for, in half to attend without knowing what to expect. This conference was the defining feature that shaped my career. Thanks in particular to Christian Stevens (Ghent).

To the people in the Chemical Engineering department, especially the many Friday afternoons spent at beerclub, who shaped my ideas, where we even hatched some of them, including team Rural Rocks: Doreen Nabaho, Mlu Mnguni, Allison Kasozi and Naadia van der Bergh.

<picture to come>

Then, thanks to all the fish. Since that first wobbly back in 2008 when I was looking for myself and built you a pond, you taught me how to manage nutrients holistically. Well, not you, per se, you simply swam around doing what you do, but you expressed your pleasure at the health of the pond through shagfests, spawning jewels each generation successively more beautiful than the one before, and this pleased me.

Fiona and Rasputin, my dogs, who distract me from depression and the PhD in equal measure. I don’t know if I should thank you for that or not. But sitting next to you writing, you are beautiful unique animals and you remind me to never lose my wildness. Oxo, you raised me and I miss you a lot.

I gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation as well as the Centre for Bioprocess Engineering Research Centre. I acknowledge and greatly appreciate the funding contribution of the South African Water Research Commission (WRC) through projects WRC K5/2000 and WRC K5/2380, as well as the technical input of the steering committee to this project. This is however not the full story. In July 2009 (I think), hope, money and wits have worn through. A last ditch effort saw me writing a funding proposal to the WRC, with no experience to guide me. I wrote with only my Big Dream in mind. It was a crazy dream and one notable grumpy man already said it couldn’t be done. My mentors were all out of town and the deadline was around the corner. I thought, this is it. If I don’t get this project, then I quit. If I do, then someone in this universe, at least, believes in me. Project K5/2000 was underfunded (my fault) and ran overtime (also my fault), but it was enough to let me know that this big dream had at least some cause for closer investigation.

Thank you to Joe Macke and the workshop, my father Koos Verster, and pretty much the whole of Paarden Eiland (and beyond) who helpfully dealt with my weird descriptions of valves and pipes and thingies to make cheap plastic prototypes that actually worked, well.

Thank you to the reference group of the K5/2380 project, as well as the people who were acknowledged in the previous project (WRC Technical report 587/13: especially Francis Pocock, and the people at the Athlone Waste Water Treatment works)  In particular Valerie Naidoo, Francois Wolfaardt, Faizal Bux, Doug Rawlings, Pam Welz, Alf Botha, Wade Edwards, Clive Garcin. Thank you to Ziningi Madonsela, Matt Myers, Tatenda Dinha, Aileen Brandt, Sanda Mahlakahlaka, and Sibusisiwe Maseko who contributed work.

During the K5/2380 project, I worked with the best team ever. Thank you to Lesley Mostert, Madelyn Johnstone-Robertson, Tayana Raper, Shilpa Rumjeet and Sharon Rademeyer.

<picture to come>

Thanks to Barrie Coetzee and Peter King for strategic discussions in the context of the City of Cape Town, and Kevin Winter, Harro von Blottnitz and Brett Cohen for timely discussions on sustainability. Cities are truly complex, fascinating environments, which is why I didn’t go be a hippie somewhere rural, I guess.

Thanks to Mark van Loosdrecht, Robbert Kleerebezem and others at TU Delft who inspired me, and were receptive to what felt like at times bizarre questions.

Thanks to Daniela Bezuidenhout and Werner Barnard who both finished their PhDs long ago but who have the longest history of this struggle with me. Thanks to Kyle Mason-Jones for ongoing beer-fuelled critical discussions.

Immense gratitude to Ute Kuhlmann, Ruth Rice, Helene Smit, Norma Kamanga, and others, for the soul fixing.

To CeBER students and staff, each with your own projects and passions. Together you weave an ecosystem of knowledge that is delightful, and hugely important. Thank you.

To my favourite authors: Leonie Joubert, Rose George and Carol Gilligan. How I write and what I know, deeper than conscious thought, I learnt from you. The amazing UCT library where I first encountered these authors, particularly Fiona Jones who guided and ordered books with what seemed to me wild abandon, thank you.

To my mother, Beulah Verster, and my supervisor, Sue Harrison, thank you for your unwavering support. Often financially, sometimes professionally, but always, patiently, as strong women. You are frustrating at times, but always spectacular role models. Add to these, strong mentors Lesley Mostert, Allison Lewis and Dee Bradshaw.

Almost lastly, to those who crushed me, negated me, frustrated me. I pulled through not because of you but in spite of you. Don’t go give yourself airs that your poor form helped me grow in any way. It didn’t. It near killed me. To the countless people whose insight made the sun shine a bit brighter that day, I live for you, for those little nuggets of commitment that makes ecosystems work. And to the many people I cared for and who let me down: I will always be fond of you, you taught me so very much, but with this thesis I leave you behind.

Lastly, my gratitude to Graham, for the calm.

 

Foldscope

My latest mission is to learn how to grow algae. My research group – the Centre for Bioprocess Engineering Research (CeBER) has been doing it for a while and are very good at it, I have based a part of my work on wastewater biorefineries on this, but I can’t actually grow algae yet. Alongside this I am working on ShackLabs, possibly better described as the “frugal science” movement than the DIYBio that I have been using so far. I recently had a conversation with analytical scientists testing if water is safe to drink, with the current drought in Cape Town, and asked if we can get to a test that people can easily use to test their drinking water if they get these from alternative supplies – boreholes, well points, spring water, rainwater storage tanks… No. And not cheap either. Equipment was a big factor. I simply refuse to accept this answer. Yes, in addition to the equipment hurdles we need to educate people on the scientific method and how to evaluate risk when it comes to water, but I think this is entirely possible, and very much needed in our pursuit of Water Sensitive Spaces (or Cities, or Design, the acronyms vary).

I recently came across the Foldscope. Awesome.

<deleted a bit of a rant about how I want to download the design and figure the rest out and I think they didn’t make it available for download, update, they did (see full article link below, and it’s not that easy.>.

They have a kickstarter campaign, which, yes, as a platform is dubious (citation needed), and the backers are frustrated, and life happens. The team updates regularly about why the stuff isn’t sent yet, and I got the feels for them because it’s honest and man can I relate. So I deleted the rant.

They have a TED talk, to whet your appetite but importantly is not the whole story (TED is the START of the conversation, not the whole thing. Don’t be lazy.) (And not all bugs are monster soup. Bugs are cool. Like people, we’re a mixed bag.)

Read their articles too:
Foldscope: Origami-Based Paper Microscope,  June 18, 2014, James S. Cybulski, James Clements, Manu Prakash

And there’s also a chemistry set apparently,  this blogpost reports them as saying “The things that you make for kids to explore science [are] also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile.” They call it “punchcard programmable fluidics”

Punch Card Programmable Microfluidics, March 4, 2015, George Korir, Manu Prakash
This looks like the full article: Punch Card Programmable Microfluidics, George Korir, Manu Prakash

They also have a Paperfuge – low-cost centrifuge, which is fabulous for diagnostics but doesn’t do much for my WWBR thing, I don’t think. Maybe, though.

On Manu P’s research page, they say, and I paraphrase: “What a scientist can do for lots of dollars, an engineer can do for a nickel. Thinking about cost as an engineering constraint brings life to science. … It’s time to take cost constraints into serious consideration.”

 

Daar onder in die vlei stap ‘n mannetjie…

Uiteindelik!

Ek sing of fluit dikwels die deuntjie as ek stap, en wonder dan gefrustreerd wat al die woorde is. My pa het dit gesing toe ek klein was.

Vanoggend onthou om die internet in te roep. Volgende stappie sing ek die hele ding!

Daar onder in die vlei stap ‘n mannetjie,

hy is so klein en so skraal.

Hy swaai ‘n ou klein koffiekannetjie

en stap na sy werk vir die honderdste maal.

Langs die bome en blink waterstrome

sing hy nou so ver as hy gaan,

want gister is ‘n baba gebore,

en hy is die vader daarvan.

Sy naam is Bart Kasper de Kompaan,

hy dink aan ‘n naam vir sy seun.

Freek Jasper en Sarel kan dalk gaan,

maar Gotliep Antonie staan hom beter aan.

Ongelukkig verwag sy ou vader

dat die kind na sy oupa moet heet.

Jan Donderdag van Gorrelberg van Staden

en daarby Kasparus Bart Keet.

(gekry van http://forum.afrikaanseforum.co.za/index.php?topic=145.0 )

Ek was altyd, is nog steeds, vas oortuig die outjie is ‘n mier. En die idee dat ‘n piepklein miertjie so baie name moet dra tickle my skeef.

(source: https://drawception.com/viewgame/ZS7e3yH9zP/an-asthmatic-ant-with-some-heavy-shopping/)

Life is meaningless, and that is romantic

I came across a speech by Tim Minchin, doing the rounds on hippie feel good sites everywhere recently.

 

The full thing can be found on his website: www.timminchin.com/2013/09/25/occasional-address/

 

It was good and honest and funny, but what stuck with me, and maybe reposting it in shortened version here reduces the effect, so go watch the whole thing, but it was this life is meaningless quip. When I read the original interview I did for the legacy project again, I said the same thing. And did not find it depressing. So, yeah.

image adapted from http://www.wendymallas.com/portfolio-tim-minchin.php

 

… Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.

 

He then shares nine life lessons, all of them profound and beautiful but I didn’t bother to replicate them all here. Go check out the link, really.

 

After all, it’s something to do with your time… chasing a dream. And if it’s a big enough one, it’ll take you most of your life to achieve, so by the time you get to it and are staring into the abyss of the meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead so it won’t matter.

 

Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Australophithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.

 

You are lucky to be here. Well done you, for dragging yourself up by the shoelaces, but you were lucky. You didn’t create the bit of you that dragged you up. They’re not even your shoelaces. Understanding that you can’t truly take credit for your successes, nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate. Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually.

 

A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like arse-holes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

 

Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend to generate false dichotomies, then try to argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully executed shots from either end of separate tennis courts.

 

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

 

Define Yourself By What You Love

 

I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless. It was not a flippant assertion. However, I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance: You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, god, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll be old. And then you’ll be dead.

 

There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence, and that is: fill it. Not fillet. Fill. It.

 

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours. Good luck.

Rickety Bridge

The transcript of the talk I gave at the SA Geography teachers conference, on 24 September 2014.

The title, roughly, is Permaculture, water and the landscape: the connectedness of things

 

The attendees made for a lovely audience, so much laughing in all the right places that I got totally overexcited. 🙂 I’m not quite happy with the structure and content of this talk yet, but I think it’s starting to get there. (As a point aside, I think I should make a talk that gets into the nitty gritty of Permaculture, water and the landscape, but first, I need to write 3x 4000-6000 word essays on the PhD… sigh) Also, this was the first talk where my special person was in the audience. That was … different.

When I was building this talk, I thought, I work in sewage, and this is a dinner time talk, so…that’s not going to work. I also thought you, as geographers, probably know more about water and the landscape than I do. You probably also had a long day, and I don’t want to exhaust you further with more technical stuff.

To be honest I just put this slide in everywhere because I love it so much, but to give it some place here, this is a rather random talk, some things may be too technical for you, some things may be too general, some too soft and mushy, some too hard… Take what you like from it, and just sit back for the rest. The talk will be online, so you can dip into it whenever you want to again. I learnt about constructivist learning approaches this week, that really appeals to me, so I would like you to build this learning with me.

To read the quote, it’s a Bruce Lee quote, but I can’t do the voice, so bear with me:

 

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend.

It’s a bit weird for me to be here, I’m not a geographer, I don’t even really know what it is, I’m not a teacher, even though I’m learning to be one, I’m on a course! So the web says you all learn about everything on the earth (laughter). I can relate to that, that’s cool.

So I didn’t want to talk about sewage, and then I thought, what is the big thing that I want to talk about? I can tell you about that we have too much dirty water, that our stormwater causes too much flooding because our cities are paved over. That we have a flush and forget, out of sight out of mind mentality where it comes to wastes. That we struggle to manage manure at feedlots at the same time as we struggle to fertilise and nourish our fields. We all know these things, I don’t want to bore you with it.

 

Now, as engineers and scientists, we like to identify the issue and then address it. I think it’s important to communicate it too. So I’ll follow this approach tonight, but as useful as this is, it causes a lot of specialisation, and creates these silo’s of knowledge, so I want to give one other approach before I dive in.

This quote is by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and I go through these phases where my thinking pulls a lot from the Little Prince, so I apologise, I got a bit carried away with all the pictures… anyways, this quote sums it up.

 

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work (of course, this is important, to organise teams and so on, but it’s not the only thing), but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

So, what’s my big issue? Well, here’s another quote from the little prince. The fox says, you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. And we have tamed our environment. But this is not the whole issue. Here’s another quote, from Bruno Latour, and I learnt a new word – post-environmentalism! I’m a post-environmentalist. Actually, my engineering friends think I’m a hippie and my hippie friends think I’m a capitalist, but hey. Here’s the quote:

 

Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather than he abandoned the creature to itself.

 

We create monsters. It happens. But we need to take responsibility for them. And I think a lot of the environmental and other challenges we have now is not that much because we created the circumstances for them, but that we then abandoned them.

For me, the big issue is this: Tame is not sustainable.

 

When I finished this talk and sent it off to Bridget, and went home, I suddenly thought, oh my God, they’re going to think I’m talking about anarchy. I’m not. Tame and wild is not like order and chaos. To me, tame is disconnected, subdued. Wild is connected, an ecosystem. Community. We do not know ourselves and our interactions with the wider world anymore. This quote by Ian McCallum sums it up – to understand wildness is to discover the thread that binds us to all living things.

I guess it’s a different way of identifying the issue, and now that we have, the really tricky thing is to communicate it. We are trying to bring many very different minds together to talk to each other, and that’s really hard. I want to share with you two approaches that I think does very well at achieving bringing people together to learn in a fun way. The first is biomimicry. It is a design tool: I don’t think it does particularly well at actually addressing challenges, so I think that needs to be kept in mind, but as a design and educational tool, it’s fantastic. The website has excellent resources and a lot of them are free:

 

biomimicrysa.co.za

http://biomimicry.net/about/biomimicry/biomimicry-designlens/

 

Biomimicry has six principles, and Permaculture has 12 principles, which I’ll get to in a moment. These principles help a lot to get your mind around things and iteratively develop solutions to them. They are also very helpful to get people out of their areas of technical jargon, they get to play together in a neutral space.

(I did not go into the principles during the talk as the audience was tired and I thought not really in the space to pay attention, they seemed to want a quick laugh, dessert and then a bed…)

 

Biomimicry’s six principles:

• Adapt to changing conditions
• Be locally attuned and responsive
• Use life-friendly chemistry
• Be resource efficient (materials and energy)
• Integrate development with growth
• Evolve to survive

Permaculture is the conscious design of human living environments that reflect the ecological principle that underlies nature.

I think Permaculture does a good job of communicating the issues, as well as addressing them. Perhaps more in the organic sphere, land restoration and food production, for example, but the principles can be used in any setting (some more metaphorically speaking than others).

Permaculture principles: (permacultureprinciples.com/resources/free-downloads/)

1. Observe and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
6. Produce no waste
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small and slow solutions
10. Use and value diversity
11. Use edges and value the marginal
12. Creatively use and respond to change.

I want to particularly highlight the eleventh principle – Use edges and value the marginal.

It’s the things on the edges that innovate because they have to, because if they don’t, they die. At the edges you also get to interact with other things, cross the boundaries, which allows you to make connections that may not have been possible before.

What we have move to the margins is our waste, so I want to take the last part of the talk and focus on how to address this big issue in terms of waste, and the work that we do.

Biomimicry considers that nature knows no waste. Permaculture says a waste is simply a resource that is out of place, that we can innovate and make valuable again. Even OMO gets in on the action, and says, waste is good (I’m paraphrasing).

At CeBER, the Centre for Bioprocessing Engineering Research, we look at how these things fit together, what we can make from wastes using biology, and also what that means in terms of economics, and if it fits well in the bigger picture, if it is really good for the environment and so on.

I didn’t know how much technical stuff you want so I just put in the introduction pictures, but please feel free to ask questions at any level of technicality.

The Biominerals group is our largest group and the best funded (and sometimes with the ego to match). They use bugs to treat mine wastewater, but also to mine low grade ores, mainly for copper, but also for zinc and gold. They do great work, they’re really brilliant.

 

One of the main research areas in CeBER is bioleaching, a process where microbes are used as biocatalysts to convert metal compounds into their soluble forms. This leaching process is an alternative economical method for the recovery of metals such as copper, zinc and gold from low-grade mineral ores, with low investment and operation costs.

The Algae group is the PR face of CeBER: all our press photos have algae group pictures in, and the most beautiful people work in this group. It’s true. This group looks at if algae is all it’s cracked up to be, it started with the hype around biomass to fuels, and looked at if it made economical sense – it can’t, and now we look at ways to supplement the economics with higher-value products like carotenoids and nutraceuticals. This group also looks at the whole ecosystem and if it makes environmental sense.

 

CeBER focuses on algal cultivation, harvesting and processing for the production of carotenoids, nutraceuticals, lipds and energy products. Maximising lipid productivity through optimising the uptake of light and CO2 is critical to systems scale-up. Through the biorefinery concept, inventory analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). we identify key contributions required for feasible algal processes.

And then there’s me. I learn from the biominerals group who work with the very dilute mining waters, and the algae group who knows about biorefineries, and I try to bring them together, to create value from a range of wastewaters – my passion being municipal wastewater. I found this beautiful quote at the last conference in Spain this year, which was very exciting as more and more people are now getting the hang of this thing. That does make me feel a bit odd because now it feels that I’m moving away from the edge, so I have to do something to keep the edge!

 

A biorefinery is characterised as an explicitly integrative, multifunctional overall concept that uses biomass as a diverse source of raw materials for the sustainable generation of a spectrum of different intermediates and products (chemicals, materials and/or bioenergy/fuel) whilst including the fullest possible use of all raw material components – EU definition, presented at RRB2014 by Timoteo de la Fuente.

 

This is really important, as the first ‘biorefineries’ were all about taking one raw material, say the crops that were taking the space for our food, and turning it into fuel, and that was not working well at all. These biorefineries now start to approach much more of an ecosystem, and I think that is really moving in the right direction.

I want to end with coming back to that longing for the sea. I spent a lot of time fighting and trying to figure out how to make this world better. We are in a tough spot, a lot of things are not going well, and it is easy to get despondent.

 

Then I found this word, jouissance. It means physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy, and comes from the French word jouir, for “enjoy”.

 

I’m not sure if I should say this, but I’m going to anyway. This word also has links to orgasm (roars of laughter which made me feel quite goofy), … and I think that’s epic.

 

I first came across jouissance in a book written about capitalism (Capitalism’s New Clothes – Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis), of all things, in which Colin Cremin describes it as follows:

 

… a brief flash of enjoyment (more roars of laughter, making me very happy 🙂 ) achieved after excessive pursuit (a few giggles). The pleasure lies in the obstacles to fulfillment – but only if that fulfillment eventually arrives, and only if there are obstacles.

 

In our search for tameness and control, we want everything to always flow smoothly, but that robs us of jouissance. On the other hand, the fact that so many things are changing so fast is not such a bad thing. So I want to implore you to embrace a bit of wildness, in these interesting times. We need to work hard to make things better, but celebrate those small wins, have some brief flashes of enjoyment. This way, we would get further, and have more fun.

And that’s it! Thank you for your kind attention.

 

*** The talk after mine was by Carin De Villiers on SA’s Alternatives to Coal, and can be found here (1.5MB).

Planet of slums

Spoiler alert: (from the epilogue)

p201 Will the poor revolt?

A complex question… Even within a single city, slum populations can support a bewildering variety of responses to structural neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neoliberal NGOs and revolutionary social movements. But if there is no monolithic subject or unilateral trend in the global slum, there are nonetheless myriad acts of resistance.

 

The demonising rhetorics of the various international “wars” on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around slums and urban poverty that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion.

 

As the Third World middle classes increasingly bunker themselves in their suburban themeparks and electrified “security villages”, they lose moral and cultural insight into the urban badlands they have left behind.

 

meanwhile…

p203

…the Pentagon has evolved its own distinctive perspective on global urban poverty: MOUT “Military Operations on Urbanised Terrain”.

“The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, highrise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world” – the journal of the Army War College (1996).

 

The nonprofit thinktank RAND found in a study on how demographic changes will affect future conflict, that the urbanisation of world poverty has produced “the urbanization of insurgency”. They imply that the megaslum has become the weakest link in the new world order.

 

p205

Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalised segments of the urban poor. This is the true “clash of civilisations”.

 

So while the violence from the poor is one option among many coping strategies, the response from the privileged is uniform: more violence.

Planet of slums, by Mike Davis. 2006, published by Verso.

Find it on Goodreads.

 

I’m writing this when I’m supposed to be writing up my PhD. I feel that this is more critical. I’m writing about this to build a greater understanding of what I, as an engineer, can contribute, but also, maybe more importantly, what not to do. Going in to townships to make makeshift sanitation solutions, or promote small scale entrepreneurship, is actually not going to solve this problem.

 

It is important to understand the poor, by a vast majority, did not end up in their situation, or stay there, by their own fault. It is important to acknowledge, and understand how our privilege is contributing to their misery – not (only) as a legacy, but as a current, vibrant global strategy. Then we might understand their anger, and along with empathy, might get frightened enough at the possibilities of urban conflict to change it. One can hope.

 

Some quotes from the book below.

p14

Some would argue that urbanisation without industrialisation is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency of silicon capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of employment. But in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and much of South Asia, urbanisation without growth, [as the book explains later] is more obviously the legacy of a global political conjecture – the worldwide debt crisis of the late 1970’s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third-world economies in the 1980’s – than any iron law of advancing technology.

 

p15

Part of the secret, of course, was that policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF and World Bank continued to generate an exodus of surplus rural labour to urban slums, even as cities ceased to be job machines.

 

For more on how the World Bank systemically screws the rest of the world, read this WorldvsBank SACSIS piece

 

p27

Everywhere in the Third World, housing choice is a hard calculus of confusing trade-offs. As the anarchist architect John Turner famously pointed out, “Housing is a verb”. The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimise housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety. For some people, including many pavement-dwellers, a location near a job – say, in a produce market or train station – is even more important than a roof. For others, free or nearly free land is worth epic commutes from the edge to the centre. And for everyone the worst situation is a bad, expensive location without municipal services or security of tenure.

 

On structural adjustment programs (SAPs)

p62

The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed on debtor nations in the 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programes and, often, the privatisation of housing markets.

 

p65

The agencies who plan slum eviction see an alternative for the people in the cheap highrise flats: the people in the slums know that eviction and life in these flats would reduce their means of reproduction and the possibilities for subsistence production. Furthermore access to work is more difficult due to the location of these flats. This is the simple reason why the slumdwellers prefer to stay in the slum and are starting to fight against eviction. For them the slum is the place where production under deteriorating circumstances is still possible. For the urban planner, it is a mere cancer in the city (Evers and Korff)

 

p68

In a rare comparative analysis of fiscal administration among ten Third World cities, Nick Devas finds a consistently regressive pattern, with little evidence of any serious effort to assess and collect property taxes from the affluent.

Part of the blame must be assigned to the IMF which, in its role as the Third World’s financial watchdog, everywhere advocates regressive user fees and charges for public services but never proposes counter-part efforts to tax wealth, conspicuous consumption, or real estate. Likewise, the World Bank crusades for ‘good governance’ in the cities of the Third World but undermines its likelihood by seldom supporting progressive taxation.

Urban democracy is still the exception rather than the rule, especially in Africa. Even where the poor have the right to vote, they can seldom wield it to effect significant redistributions of expenditures or tax resources: a variety of structural strategies – including metropolitan political fragmentation, control of budgets by provincial or national authorities, and the establishment of autonomous agencies – have been used to insulate urban decision-making from the popular franchise.

 

on the other hand…

p72

Praising the praxis of the poor became a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelessness. “By demonstrating the ability, the courage, and the capacity for self-help of slum people,” Jeremy Seabrook writes, “the way [was] prepared for a withdrawal of state and local government intervention and support.”

 

p77

NGO’s “pre-empt community-level capacity-building as they take over decision-making and negotiating roles”… NGO’s monopolize expert knowledge and middleman roles in the same way as traditional political machines. One famed NGO, a neighbourhood microbank, “beginning as a small grassroots project driven by needs and capacities of local women, grew into a large, complex, top-down, technically oriented bureaucracy, that was less accountable to and supportive of it’s low-income base.”

 

Illusions of self help

p78

“Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealise people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a manner of fact these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose the agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is to constantly divert people’s attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends.”

P.K.Das, Mumbai housing activist, on slum-oriented NGO’s

 

On land ownership

p80

For owners it represents their formal incorporation into the official city, and the chance to realise what may be a dramatically increased asset. For tenants, or those unable to pay the additional taxes that usually follow, it may push them off the housing ladder altogether. Titling, in other words, accelerates social differentiation in the slum and does nothing to aid renters, the actual majority of the poor in many cities.

 

The root cause of urban slumming seems to lie not in urban poverty but in urban wealth – Gita Verma.

 

p96

Throughout the Third World, post-colonial elites have inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities. Despite rhetorics of national liberation and social justice, they have aggressively adapted the racial zoning of the colonial period to defend their own class privileges and spatial exclusivity.

 

p97

The inequalities that defined Bombay as a colonial port town have continued … Investment is always available to beautify the already well-endowed parts of the city. But there is no money to provide even basic services to the poorer areas. – Kalpana Sharma

– Does this sound familiar? Here’s a hint: World Design Capital 2014.

p99

In big Third World cities, the coercive Panoptican role of “Haussmann” is typically played by special-purpose development agencies; financed by offshore lenders like the World Bank and immune to local vetoes, their mandate is to clear, build, and defend islands of cyber-modernity amidst unmet urban needs and general underdevelopment.

 

p119

It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganisation of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation.

Rodgers, following Anthony Giddens, conceptualises the core process as a “disembedding” of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence.

 

p131

Public transport is heavily subsidised in almost all cities because of its large positive externalities (reduced need for roadways and reduced congestion) but also to ensure access by poor people. Nevertheless, many poor people still cannot afford transit services. Thus cities face pressure to keep fares very low. But in doing so, they sacrifice bus quality and comfort. Middle-class riders react by buying cars as soon as they can. With low cost scooters and motorcycles, the flight of the middle class is hastened, transit revenues diminish, and operators reduce quality further as they serve a poorer clientele. Although the quality of the service suffers first, a decrease in quantity of service often follows. – Daniel Sperling and Eileen Clausen

 

Slum ecology

p 134

Cities in the abstract are the solution to the global environmental crisis: urban density can translate into great efficiencies in land, energy and resource use, while democratic public spaces and cultural institutions likewise provide qualitatively higher standards of enjoyment than individualised enjoyment and commodified leisure. However, as urban theorists like Patrick Geddes have long recognized, both environmental efficiency and public affluence require the preservation of a green matrix of intact ecosystems, open spaces and natural services: cities need an alliance with nature in order to recycle their waste products into usable inputs for farming, gardening and energy production. Sustainable urbanism presupposes the preservation of surrounding wetlands and agriculture. Unfortunately, Third World cities – with few exceptions – are systematically polluting, urbanizing, and destroying their crucial environmental systems.

 

p147

The neoliberal restructuring of Third World urban economies that has occurred since the late 1970s has had a devastating impact on the public provision of healthcare. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) – the protocols by which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the IMF and World Bank – “usually require public spending, including health spending (but not military spending) to be cut.”

 

p150

The environmental conditions in Indian cities are continuing to deteriorate because the middle class is actively participating in the exclusion of large sections of the population from access to basic services. The consequence of such monopolisation of state resources and benefits is that whilst an awareness of environmental problems is growing amongst the middle class, to date they have been more concerned about the inconveniences they suffer on congested roads and the resultant air pollution than about the risk of epidemic and endemic disease.

-Susan Chaplin

 

p151

Urban poverty in the world could reach 45 or 50 percent of the total population living in the cities.

 

p152

The exogenous developments that necessitated adjustment were not tackled by the IMF and the World Bank, the major ones being falling commodity prices and exorbitant debt servicing, but every domestic policy and public program was fair game for retrenchment. – economist Frances Stewart

 

p154

Although the debt-collectors claim to be in the business of economic development, they seldom allow poor nations to play by the same rules that richer countries used to promote growth in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

 

p155

The IMF and World Bank, as we have seen, promoted regressive-taxation through public service user fees for the poor, but made no counterpart effort to reduce military expenditure or to tax the incomes or real estate of the rich. As a result, infrastructure and public health everywhere lost the race with population increase.

 

p156

Overall wages have fallen so low in African cities that researchers can’t figure out how the poor manage to survive: this is the so-called ‘wage puzzle’.

 

p160

Worsening economic conditions limit the capacity of urban working-class household to implement long-term social mobility strategies, since it forces them to mobilise their inner resources and make extensive use of their labour force for basic survival.

– Augustin Escobar and Mercedes Gonzales

 

p161

Often the myriad pressures were too overwhelming and family solidarity itself collapsed. What may once have been a unit that supported and sustained its members has now become a unit in which members compete for survival.

 

Success stories?

p168

“Bangalore’s high tech [boom] is a drop in the bucket in a sea of poverty.”

 

p175

Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade. The rise of this informal sector is a direct result of liberalisation. -The Challenge of Slums

 

p178

Researchers have been forced to scrap the optimistic “Todaro model” embraced by modernisation theorists and Alliance for Progress idealogues in the 1960s, according to which the informal sector is simply a school of urban skills from which more rural immigrants eventually graduate to formal-sector jobs. Instead of upward mobility, there is seemingly only a down staircase by which redundant formal-sector workers and sacked public employees descend into the black economy.

 

A surplus humanity?

p179

De Soto’s bootstrap model: Get the state and formal-sector labour unions out of the way, add micro-credit for micro-entrepreneurs and land titling for squatters, then let markets take their course to produce the transubstantiation of poverty into capital.

 

The nine epistemological fallacies of Hernando de Soto’s approach:

p180

1. A failure to distinguish micro-accumulation from sub-subsistence.
2. Most participants in the informal economy work directly or indirectly for someone else.
3. “Informal employment” by definition, is the absence of formal contracts, rights, regulations, and bargaining power.
4. Informality ensures extreme abuse of the weakest and smallest.
5. The informal sector – as observed by Frediric Thomas in Kolkata – generates jobs not by elaborating new divisions of labour, but by fragmenting existing work, and thus subdividing incomes.
6. Because they contend with such desperate conditions, it is perhaps ont surprising that the poor turn to a “third economy”, including gambling, pyramid schemes, and lotteries. Throughout the urban Third World religious devotion revolves around attempts to influence fortune or importune good luck.
7. Micro-credit and cooperative lending, while helpful to those informal enterprises managing to tread water, have had little impact on the reduction of poverty.
8. Increasing competition within the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks and solidarity essential to the survival of the very poor.
9. Politically, the informal sector, in the absence of enforced labour rights, is a semi-feudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and ethnic exclusion.

“The informal sector grows, but income drops with it” – Bryan Roberts

 

Epilogue

p199

A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatised as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy or society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at least, the real crisis of world capitalism. – Jan Breman, writing of India.

 

p201

Peri-urban poverty – a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of the countryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political life of the traditional city – is the radical new face of inequality.

 

p202

The future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.

I had a nightmare, while reading this book. I was walking through the forest, and there were skeletons of children, shot in the back of the head. The bullet holes were in the shape of Africa.

Wobbly

27 Dec 2014

I could feel this one coming like a storm brewing, so I was ready for it. And as I sat there crying at 2am, I was watching over myself, analysing it all rather objectively. Fuck I’m weird.

As you live deeper in the Heart, the mirror gets clearer and cleaner.

– Rumi

It’s not like I’m not involved in this experience, I am acutely feeling the emotions, the pain. Not like I’m masking or blocking or being a spectator to my own life (which I might have been before, I think). It hurts like cutting yourself hurts. After tasting the experience when I extracted a wart with a pair of nail clippers, I can completely appreciate the need to cut yourself. The pain is that same clear, deep, pure pain, and if you cut yourself you have the priviledge of physically seeing it, which somehow makes it more bearable, and you can control when and how much and for how long it hurts. This inside cut is completely unpredictable, like having a piece of glass in your foot and having to run. Just when you forget about it it slices you up some more.

Anyways.

I would be sitting there, feeling completely sorry for myself. Then, when I’ve calmed down a bit, I would think, why am I feeling this way? Is it justified, what can I do to resolve this? Then I think through what Ruth and I have discussed, so many times. I feel this way because of that, this makes me insecure because of that experience. I react this way because of that and I feel that because of what this person did and that made me feel a certain way. At this stage I generally start blubbering all over again, but by the third or fourth cycle I manage to sit through it.

I would usually start off crying, thinking, I should tell my special person I feel this way. After all, the whole point of a healthy relationship is communication and I should be able to tell him to comfort me. But I don’t, instead I freeze up and get all tense, and then retreat to a dark hole somewhere where he can’t hear me (This is also why my bathrooms need to beautiful and comforting and designed with enough space to get comfy and not bruise myself in a fit of anger or temper-tantrums). I think that I would bother him and upset him to tell him this, leaving the poor man to worry and get all confused on his own. (He thinks it’s his fault and he’s not sure why. He suspects he snores too hard. He doesn’t.)

A recurring theme is that I don’t feel ‘fulfilled’ – see the poem I wrote in the last wobbly: The terror of suburbia. I am certainly frustrated, the PhD is a tightening noose, I don’t have a house to just go be in, this year, more than those before, is filled with big decisions; I’m at that space where you say goodbye to a previous you and for better or for worse say hello to the next phase of your life. I keep coming back to the dysfunctional things I’ve been involved in, which I call passionate but is actually just very broken. But I miss them.

I think that I don’t actually want to be in a relationship. But then I would think that I think that because it avoids actually having to cotton on to the fact that I’m scared and not sure what I’m supposed to be doing to make this work.

Somehow I think that settling into the mundane everyday hard work of a relationship is giving up on love. Because love is only the passionate kiss in the rain, throwing all caution to the wind, that you see in the movies. Obviously. Because it’s just too anti-climactic to admit that the day-to-day struggles and joys and peacefulness and commitment is the actual act of not giving up on love. It’s too much of a betrayal to admit that the passionate kiss in the rain is just another way of fighting, of saying fuck-you to someone who just isn’t in the camera’s lens at that moment.

Then, in the nurturing analysis phase of my wobbly, I remember what I told Jason Stewart in an interview a long time ago. He asked, ‘What do you think is often the difference between people who are good at what they do and people who are great at what they do?’ I said, I think we all have things we’re good at, things that need to get done and serve a purpose, but they contribute to something greater, on their own they’re just following orders. I think the difference to being great lies in having an all-consuming passion for what’s being done, but there’s also a hard-core realism at play, being tenacious and tackling challenges. Passion and dreams are not enough.

So there you go.

The ‘and’ of ‘teaching and learning’

Excerpts from an article presented by Jenni Case at a Teaching and Learning conference held at the University of Cape Town in 2014. (The presentations were recorded, if I can, I’ll link to it here).

This article interests me for two reasons, one stated by Jenni in the beginning of the presentation: With greater numbers of people enrolling in (higher) education, intensive one-on-one teaching-learning interactions become scarce. Secondly, I want to be the kind of teacher I wished for when I was young. Education was frustrating to me, as I felt there was information intentionally withheld, which I felt would help me place what I was supposed to learn in context. Getting to university and access to libraries with relevant information and no restraint on accessing them, was just fabulous.

Long title: Focusing on emergent interactions: A critical realist reconceptualization of the relationship between teaching and learning

The relationship between teaching and learning was conceptualised quite explicitly in the work by Biggs, who posited a potential ‘constructive alignment’ between modes of teaching and modes of learning, clearly outlined here:

There may well be endogenous limits to what students can do that are beyond any teacher’s control, but there are learning-related aspects that are controllable. Capitalising on them is what good teaching is about. Good teaching is getting most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that the more academic students use spontaneously. Good teaching narrows the gap.

As Ashwin writes:

…when foregrounding social practices it becomes clear that academics and students are engaged in different types of practices (p. 6)

At this point we can move to affirm a key conceptual point that both Ramsden and Biggs emphasise. Learning is not wholly determined by teaching. We should therefore not be surprised if people can learn knowledge through engaging in a MOOC; from the days of Gutenberg the regular person in the street has had access to knowledge through books and MOOCs are well described as 21^st century textbooks. Students have always used a wide range of resources in support of their learning, and what has now changed is the explosion of the range of informational resources.

Ashwin’s centring of the teaching-learning interaction on the learning object is however crucial. The heart of the teaching-learning interaction is not an interaction of merely a social kind, for example amongst student peers, but is aimed specifically towards curricular knowledge. Herewith lies a further shortfall of contemporary perspectives on teaching and learning, especially the model of ‘student-centred teaching’ that has become associated with research on approaches to teaching. If teaching-learning interactions are simply centred on students, then we end up with trying to make sure that students are ‘satisfied’ etc. On the contrary, the teaching-learning interaction is centred on knowledge. Of course, in recognising the profound challenges that students face in taking on new knowledge, the interaction is centrally there to support that process, but it is not simply about making students or teachers feel good .

Focusing on teaching-learning interactions is maybe not a new position in educational theory, but arguably a forgotten one. Ashwin offers the following succinct quote from McKeachie :

Fortunately most educational situations are interactive situations in which a developing, learning human being engages with a situation in ways designed to meet [her or] his learning needs. Part of that situation is another human being who has some resources for instruction and some capacity to adapt to the learner. It is this that makes education both endlessly challenging and deeply humane.

This brief illustrative analysis has thus demonstrated the practical manifestations of the teaching-learning interaction. The activities of the lecturer – providing clear explanations, asking questions in class, running the course with punctuality and professionalism, answering students’ questions – prompted and facilitated student learning. To call these instances teaching-learning interactions is to look closely at the way in which particular kinds of teaching activity were seen to prompt learning, as reported in student interviews. A closing quote from a student, Sizwe, who was asked to comment on what helped his learning in his course summarises the nature of this interaction:

Other students and the easy access of The Prof facilitated my learning in the course because I mean … The Prof himself was part of the motivation that I do extra work late, I mean on my own.

These kinds of data go beyond numerical correlations into the beginnings of an investigation of what really lies at the heart of successful teaching-learning interactions. The impact of this lecturer’s teaching on his student’s learning was grounded in his strong conceptual understanding and ability to give good explanations, but crucially went beyond clear exposition and into the realm of a personal interaction centred on students’ own grapplings with this material.

This resonates with the position taken by Ashwin, who notes:

… it [the Approaches to Learning and Teaching Perspective] tends to focus on academics’ perceptions of teaching or students’ perceptions of learning.This gives little sense of the way in which academics and students continually impact on each other in particular interactions. As a result, when the relations between academics’ approaches to teaching and students’ approaches to learning are examined, they are linked in a fairly distant manner, largely through the examination of the relation between students’ and academics’ scores on questionnaire inventories. (p. 36)

The theoretical perspective on teaching and learning put forward here has specific implications for research in higher education. Programmes that aim to describe and capture student learning and university teaching, in all their contemporary manifestations, should continue to be significant. Of particular importance is a need to understand the dynamic space in which student learning takes place, and the ways in which students mobilise social peer relations and information technology resources in effecting their learning. But if we are considering learning in higher education then we need a core focus on the ways in which the teaching-learning interaction happens. With regard to the concerns outlined at the outset to this article, of particular interest will be instances where this interaction impacts on learning for students who come from diverse academic backgrounds. It will also be important to map out the full range of possibility for teaching-learning interactions in educational contexts of limited resources, for example in large class enrolments.

Jenni’s blog: ‘Axes to Grind and Fish to Fry’