Should capacity and capabilities be learning outcomes? How we managed at interdisciplinary LIFE course implementation in Tallinn University.

1. Responsive education for sustainable
development: the LIFE course case
Venia legendi: Kai Pata
April, 23rd, 2021, Tallinn

2. I aim to promote the
eco-sustainable,
inclusive values for
the learning
communities.
Technology is only
one transforming
agent that mediates
the capacity
formation for
sustainable
development.

3. Selected research papers as stepping stones
Workplace learning
Ley, T., Maier, R., Thalmann, S., Waizenegger, L., Pata, K. , & Ruiz-Calleja, A. (2019). A knowledge
appropriation model to connect scaffolded learning and knowledge maturation in workplace learning
settings. Vocations and Learning , 1-22.
Pata, K., Santos, P., Burchert, J. (2016). Social recognition provision patterns in professional Q&A forums
in Healthcare and Construction. Computers in Human Behavior , 55, 571−583.
Fessi, A., Pammer-Schindler, V., Pata, K ., Feyertag, S., Mõttus, M., Janus, J., & Ley, T. (2020). A
Cooperative Design Method for SMEs to Adopt New Technologies for Knowledge Management: A Multiple
Case Study. Journal of Universal Computer Science , 26 (9), 1189-1212.

4. Distributed cognition and ecological learning
Pata & Bardone, 2014;
Ley et al., 2014,
Ley et al., 2019

5. Social validation
in work
communities
Pata et al., 2016

6. Selected research papers as stepping stones
Transforming practices
Pata, K., Maslo, I. Jõgi, L. (2021). Transforming adult education from neo-liberal to holistically inclusive
adult education in Baltic states. In Kersch et al. (Eds.) Young Adults and Active Citizenship. Springer
Lifelong Learning Book Series.
Pata, K., Ümarik, M., Jõgi, L. (2020). Paths of professonal transformation in the context of a changing
teaching culture at university. In Jõgi et al. (Eds.) Teaching and Learning at the University: Practices and
Transformations, 151.
Citizen science, open science
Roche, J. , Bell, L., Galvao, C, Golombic Y.N., Kloetzer, L., Knoben, N., Laakso, M., Lorke, J., Mannion,
G., Massetti, L., Mauchline, A., Pata, K., Ruck, A., Taraba, P., Winter, S. (2020) Citizen Science,
Education, and Learning: Challenges and Opportunities. Frontiers in Sociology.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.613814

7. Capacity building goal of adult and nonformal education
The main task in front of adult and nonformal education is to become the
key driver of broadscale human resource development that confronts the
ecological crisis.
Transforming education for sustainable futures (2020) stated that we need to
consider a relational approach to capacity and competence (Faulkner et al.,
2018) that implies that a capacity is an outcome of a relationship-in-action.
Opportunity: Developing sustainability goals as part of educational
institutions, communities and ecosystems and workplaces with the
capacity building approach.

8. How should learning outcomes at higher education and
informal education aim capacity development?
Problems:
Learning outcomes in educational practices are largely individual learner’s
competencies centred.
Outcomes of educational practices need to address beyond individual
knowledge: implementing practical applications, developing capacities
and capabilities, and actionable knowledge
How to develop and assess learning outcomes that reach beyond
individuals?

9. The big goals: Resilience, responsiveness, sustainability
Resilience is the collective
responsive capability of
systems/agents to respond:
prepare for threats and
disruptive events, absorb
impacts, recover and adapt
to persistent stress
Sustainability is the balance
state in the capacity of the
system in:
- Preserving the current
system
- Anticipating and actuating for
the future states of the
system

10. LIFE interdisciplinary course at the university https://www.tlu.ee/en/life
LIFE vision in Board
Openness
Agency, self-direction
Collaboration
Teamwork
Scientificity
Interdisciplinarity
Vision at LIFE website highlights rather lecturer’s agency and responsibility

11. LIFE course card: learning outcomes
interdisciplinarity
teamwork, agency
self-direction
agency, teamwork
communication
Argumentative discourse and collaboration to create common ground on using disciplinary
knowledge and tools scientifically in interdisciplinary problem context was “lost”.

12. Capacity concept in the ecosystem management
The carrying capacity is a concept for
measuring the relationship between human
socio-economic activities and the natural
environment, and an important tool for
measuring and managing human sustainable
development.
Pressure resulting from human activities
Support and governance resulting from
human activities
Carrying
capacity
Figure: Carrying capacity state model
(Wang & Liu, 2019)
Current
carrying
capacity
Potential
carrying
capacity
We may calculate carrying capacity for innovation systems

13. Innovation carrying capacity: LIFE course implementation
Tensions created with LIFE vision implementation:
● New LIFE ‘tribal’ practices / practices disregarded by
colleagues who are out of ‘tribe’
● ‘Self-directed, proactive agency’ /’guided, being led’
expectations
● ‘Openness’ in problems and solutions / ‘well-structured, clear’
expectations
● ‘Scientificity’, ‘Interdisciplinarity’ / lack of shared ’conceptual
tools’ across disciplines and timespace to develop discussions
within and beyond LIFE
● ‘Sustainability’ for society / big goals unclear in LIFE projects
● Cross-schools financial maintenance and monitoring the
learning and teaching/Traditional maintenance of credits’ and
teaching loads
● Groupwork spaces/ traditional classrooms
● Need for cross-curricula timeslots for LIFE/cycle-based mode
● Lack of research evidences about LIFE impacts/Feedback
survey
Support mechanisms created in
response to tensions:
● LIFE livingrooms, trainings,
motivation awards for newcomers
● LIFE guidance resources, trainings
for students
● LIFE website as an interdisciplinary
idea and team-formation market
● LIFE space at the Astra building
● Commonly fixed timeslots for LIFE
● Monitoring instruments: mid reports
with evaluations, feedback surveys,
self-evaluation reports
● Case studies and action learning to
monitor LIFE impact at the university
Teamwork managment is not equal to argumentative discourse.
We did not invest on how to collaborate for interdisciplinary common grounds.

14. Definition of the ‘capacity’ in social systems (Morgan, 2006)
Capacity is that emergent combination of
attributes that enables a human system to
create developmental value.
Capacity is about the creation of public value.
Capacity is a collective ability to perform, deliver
value, establish relationships and systems to
renew themselves.
Capacity is an emergent property in systems,
an interaction effect that comes out of the
dynamics involving a complex combination of
attitudes, resources, strategies and skills, both
tangible and intangible.
Capacity represents some sort of identifiable
potential state or condition.
Capacity is about empowerment and identity
of people: who act together to take control
over the system to survive, to grow, diversify
and become more complex.
Capacity is the capabilities of individuals,
groups, organizations, groups of organizations
to deliver or implement some sort of intention
and with some sort of effectiveness and at
some sort of scale over time.
*‘capabilities’ refer a broad range of collective skills

15. Capabilities are enacted as collective skills (Morgan, 2006)
Capability to act deliberately and to self-organize, be
conscious and aware of its place in the world, to configure
itself, develop its own identity, develop with some sort of
strategic intent and then to act and move.
The capability to generate development results
including improved capacity itself, executing or
implementing to a certain standard, to achieve
higher-order program development results (capacity for
what?)
The capability to relate to other actors within the
context of system functions, to leverage their resources
by entering into informal alliances or formal partnerships
and gaining legitimacy and securing the systems’
operating space.
The capability to adapt and self-renew is
about the ability of an organization or system
to master change and the adoption of new
ideas, as well as confronting dramatic
shocks, going through collective and
personal discovery.
The capability to achieve coherence
without centralization and control to deal in
the system with the tension between the
need to specialize and differentiate versus
the need to bring things together and
achieve greater coherence.

16. What capabilities did lecturers intend to develop at LIFE?
Lecturers’ view of students LIFE outcomes: (green = not clearly addressed)
● the personal characteristics such as agency, self-direction, responsibility, initiative,
motivation, the awakened state, empowerment, feeling safe (To act);
● the project products and how they are communicated (Development results);
….team capacity to act
● interrelations such as partnership, peer learning, process narratives (To relate);
...leveraging resources, gain legitimacy
● the interpersonal phenomena such as trust, dialogue, common ground, meanings,
academic working culture, connection with practice world, wider context
understanding beyond the courses, and ability to find challenges, collective
discovery (To adapt and self-renew); confronting shocks … personal discovery
● shifting leadership models, deep knowledge, conceptual connections (Achieve
coherence) ….interdisciplinarity, scientificity

17. ● Temporally enacted in ill-structured actual problem
situations
● Establish shared interpersonal “tools” - teams with
regulations and roles; communities with shared visions,
mediating spaces (real and digital), mediating artifacts or
data (conceptual, visual, modelled) - to solve the problems
● Rely on what is afforded and what is constrained. May
reuse the resources, traces or activity patterns
accumulated to the environment by previous activations
● Create communicative loops between different,
interdisciplinary, potentially confronting agents that requires
translation, grounding the meanings, creativity
● Must be constantly re-activated in different
configurations to be durable and flexible
● Actuating to the future states to change the external
Ecological principles for capacity development
Spatial
reconfigurations
New grounding
and validation
interactions
Open, undefined,
dynamic, stressed
Management
tools
Examples,
patterns,
narrations
*Tools used by LIFE supervisors

18. Meta-design elements for LIFE vision sustainability
Instructional and normative elements:
● Interdisciplinarity requirements in team,
supervision, problems and methods
● Learning contract in ‘what we do’ - the course
programme for each LIFE is jointly
developed, LIFE vision may be molded with
participants’ expectations, competences and
opportunities
● Self-evaluation guidelines - > should address
actionable knowledge (‘know-why’,
‘know-how’, ‘know-what’ ‘know-who’)
development from LIFE’s vision aspects
‘throughout the project, not only in the end
● Mid-project expert evaluations: scientificity,
interdisciplinarity - feedback loop for teams
Digital and physical elements:
● LIFE website markets the problems and needs of
students and staff and externals as LIFE topics
● Digital resources for capacity development in LIFE:
‘show-why’, ‘show-how’, ‘show-what’ ‘show-who’
● Students upload the results that may be used for
marketing the impacts for the society
● Free ‘Big visions’ discussion culture, forms and time
across university schools, academic and research
tracks - > shared visions, inter-disciplinary actionable
knowledge, capabilities, capacity
Strategic instruments from university collaboration
fund:
● ‘Big LIFE’ modules, ‘Research LIFE’
Meta-design elements for cultures of participation (Fisher et al., 2004) are shared interpersonal tools
that regulate enable co-control between the self-organised actors in capacity development

19. Actionable knowledge
Actionable knowledge is knowledge which is
necessary for and required to initiate immediate
response to changes in the operational
environment.
Actionable knowledge reflects the learning
capability of individuals and organizations to
connect heterogeneous elements (social,
political, economic, technological).
The relational understanding generated by
actionable knowledge can extend existing
modes of knowing and inform future action (IGI
Global).
Actionable knowledge outputs
(Sexton & Lu, 2009)
Application context - The knowledge is
produced in the context of application.
Social accountability and reflexivity -
participants are sensitized to the impact
Transdisciplinary expertise - drawing
upon a diverse, complementary range of
expertise.
Dynamic development of organization of
work in action and reflection to guide
problem-solving.
Temporal, fluid activation of expertise
and networks
Diversity of quality controls that satisfy
real-world project needs.

20. What actionable knowledge did LIFE develop?
Leaders’ vision:
Cross-disciplinary teams from
students and educators
(Know-who) bring in the
disciplinary knowledge
(Know-what) and competences
and collaborate (Know-how) to
grow tolerance when solving
interdisciplinary problems that
provide publicity to the
university as the societal actor
(Know-why).
LIFE outcome: Cross-disciplinary collaboration
(Know-how) between the academics from
different disciplines (Know-who) established trust
relationships (Know-why) that prompted
collaborative research projects (Know-why),
formed the interdisciplinary LIFE practice
community (Know-who) who grasped the big
picture of the university (Know-why), and became
eager to proactively develop further (Know-how)
the university teaching practices (Know-how) and
the university vision (Know-why).

21. What actionable knowledge did LIFE develop?
Academics’ vision: LIFE course is a safe testing ground to trigger
(Know-how) students’ agency and self-direction and collaboration (know-why)
in interdisciplinary problem solving and teamwork settings (Know-how),
allowing them jointly with the academic experts from different disciplines and
external customers (Know-who) to define the interdisciplinary challenges,
selecting their own goals and types of outcomes (Know-why) as well as
problem-solving methods (Know-how), developing successful teamwork
routines (Know-how), establishing trust (Know-why) and collaboration among
themselves (Know-how).

22. Capacity development framework as a system

23. Research plans about capacity development
LEAD module as a case study
- Inter-disciplinary andragogy and
educational technology students, staff
- Challenges of sustainable digital
transformation
- Cross-boundary practices, tools and
development
- Capacities as learning outcomes
Capacity development for sustainability
in educational practice
Characteristics of successful capacity
development approaches and cases for
sustainability in formal and informal
learning (HE and adult, vocational, …)
How capacity development empowers the
transformation of education to be
actuating agent in the soceity?

24. References
Faulkner, L., K. Brown, and T. Quinn. (2018). Analyzing community resilience as an emergent property of dynamic
social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 23(1):24. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09784-230124
Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Ye, Y., Sutcliffe, A. G., & Mehandjiev, N. (2004). Meta-design: a manifesto for end-user
development. Communications of the ACM, 47(9), 33-37.
Morgan, P. (2006). The concept of capacity. https://ecdpm.org//wp-content/uploads/2006-The-Concept-of-Capacity.pdf
Sexton, M., & Lu, S. L. (2009). The challenges of creating actionable knowledge: an action research perspective.
Construction Management and Economics, 27(7), 683-694.
Wang, L., & Liu, H. (2019). Comprehensive evaluation of regional resources and environmental carrying capacity using a
PS-DR-DP theoretical model. Journal of Geographical Sciences, 29(3), 363-376.