New Forms of Learning: Lessons from the Strandbeest

Skeletal, alien creatures roam wild on the beaches of The Netherlands. Tubular bodies and an array of legs skitter along the sand powered by great sails of white cloth and stomachs of plastic. These creatures have not come from some crashed meteor or alien spacecraft but from the mind of a Dutch inventor, artist, engineer, and creator - Theo Jansen.

Called Strandbeest, Jansen constructs these large, insect-like beings out of plastic tubing, reclaimed materials, drinks bottles, and sailcloth. Wholly powered by the wind and the landscape around them, they move with an uncanny grace that vividly catches the eye. To see them in motion is to see something both unique and captivating. Jansen has been engaged in the Strandbeest project since 1990, and has created a great number of these “beasts with many legs” - left to wander on the beaches of his native country, or exhibited and shown around the world. When asked what the project is about, Jansen answers:

“I have been occupied in creating new forms of life.”

From the remarkable feats of design he has produced, it is clear that Jansen is a first-rate engineer. Using the power of the wind and the local environment to produce these walking, moving, living entities, but I would argue he is also an artist. He brings beauty - a strange, otherworldly-beauty perhaps, but a beauty nonetheless - into the world and asks us to exist in a space with his creations. Jansen himself speaks of this, saying that:

“The walls between art and engineering exist only in our mind.”

The claim here is that we can and should look beyond the narrow confines of particular disciplines, these walled gardens, with their own territory, their own ways of doing things, and their own aims and ambitions. Instead, we should look to work and move between these boundaries, bring things together across those lines and cross-pollinate.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that Jansen is correct when he says that these walls only exist in our minds, as I think they also exist in our schools and our education systems. From an early age, school life is divided up into subjects and we are taught in discrete disciplines. As education progresses we make choices about which of those kingdoms we wish to spend time in, and those that we don’t choose simply fall away - no longer part of our education or our learning. We move through the school, from room to room, knowing that in this space we do science, in another we do mathematics, another is for history or art. But these separate worlds rarely, if ever, mix.

Seeing Beyond the Walls

We know that so much of what occurs in professional life and creative work is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The melding of professions, academic backgrounds, and fields of work is increasing due to the way in which work has evolved over the last few decades. As we come to see that learning is much more about skills, aptitudes, and capabilities than it is about facts and knowledge, this deep need for interdisciplinary learning is only going to accelerate. A great deal of attention needs to be given to this problem, but we might be able to discern a few directions where meaningful solutions and approaches could be found.

It is clear that assessment methods need to change in much of formal education. As we emphasize the cultivation of skills and aptitudes, we will find that assessment focusing on repetition and retention is far from adequate. Assessment, of course, always goes hand in hand with teaching and learning, and if we are looking to move teaching and learning to a place of interdisciplinarity, then assessment practices must shift too.

We need to stop thinking of teachers as subject specialists in the sense of knowing a great deal about a particular subject. Whilst this is likely to always be important, far more important is that a teacher is a learning specialist - skilled, not just in teaching, but in learning as well. We need to reframe teachers as guides and mentors, assisting students through particular learning journeys and as co-travellers on those journeys. This opens up room for exploration, immersion, and a much more natural progression through education.

Finally, we should look to do away with academic subjects in the traditional sense. Core competencies, essential clusters of knowledge, and subject-specific skills can, and will, always have a place in learning, but throwing up walls between subjects artificially limits the scope for growth, creativity, and innovation. This stands in sharp contrast to the real lives of those in industry, academia, science, the creative arts, and research.

We are searching for a school system that puts skills and aptitudes at its heart and sees all knowledge, and all disciplines as equally open, equally viable, and equally amenable to exploration and discovery. Such a change will allow for precisely the inventive engagement with the world that brought us Theo Jansen’s wandering creatures on the beaches of The Netherlands. Jansen tells us that he has been occupied in creating new forms of life - as teachers we need to be occupied in creating new forms of learning.