Swimming and sinking, what pre-industrial means, and being a flexpert
I have had these two words on my mind over the last couple of days: “flexpert” and “pre-industrial”. Some thoughts about them here…
I only realised very recently that even though in my mind, “pre-industrial” refers to the climate in the 1850-1900 reference period and is very much a technical term in climate sciences, the word itself has a meaning that for probably most people overrides the technical meaning that it has for me, if they are even aware of it. And this is relevant not just because a non-technical understanding sets the point of comparison for current temperatures or CO2 levels much further back into the past than it actually is, and it probably also conveys an image of “before technologies started to develop”, which sounds almost like “before there was any real civilisation” (which, I know, is totally not what you were talking about, K., this is just how I started to think about what I am describing below! :)).
In several recent conversations about the sustainability teaching we are developing and what kind of vision of the future we have, there was some kind of concern in the room that the future will not be needing any engineers any more. I could never really understand where these concerns come from — of course, we will need all kinds of experts in the future; there still needs to be development of new ideas for how to live within planetary boundaries and also development of how to extend lifetimes for existing buildings etc; but what if there is something here about this term, “pre-industrial”, that somehow leads people in a trap, leading them to think that people want a future completely without technology? In the latest conversation where that concern about not needing engineers in the future came up, someone else then responded and talked about how hundreds of years before our time, Rome had buildings that were 4 or 5 stories high, and functioning water supply and everything, and how in Lund a couple of hundred years ago there were cafés and markets and, not least, a university (since 1666). And we could probably come up with better examples for the next time we have that conversation… So pre-fossil-fuel does not mean that nothing that we appreciate these days existed and that there wasn’t a huge amount of expertise needed on all kinds of different topics, so why should a post-fossil fuel world not also still be needing them? Yes, probably different expertises than in pre-industrial times or now, but expertise nevertheless.
And this is where the term “flexpert” comes in. A flexpert, according to someone on KTH’s podcast on the future of education, is someone who is an expert, but can apply their expertise flexibly to all kinds of tasks and challenges. I love that framing, and I think it is a really nice way of the kind of professionals we need to develop at university. People with expertise, but who can look beyond their “miles deep, inches wide” expertise and constructively engage with experts from other disciplines. And I think this is a nice way of bridging between key sustainability competencies like “future thinking”, “values thinking”, etc that sound very abstract and disconnected from disciplinary context, because of course they shouldn’t be. People should be able to bring their disciplinary expertise to the table and then create something bigger and better by applying all those key competencies.
And in other news, I still love playing with all the water experiments, like in the pictures above and below on “swimming and sinking”. It’s quite nice to see how the three floating blocks above are all submerged to a different proportion depending on their density (the two in front of the cups just sink — boooring! So I am not even showing them in water here). And below, the piglets can swim when sitting inside their little transparent boat cubes, but get to freedive without them…
