Transformative Education for Times of Crises
This blog was written by Tereza Čajková and Aurèle Destrée, who facilitated a workshop called “Transformative education for times of crises“ at the IDEA conference on Wednesday, 23 June 2022.
The “Transformative education for times of crises“ workshop invited participants to question how our modern/colonial ways of thinking, being, and living are bringing our world to the point of collapse. Also, what we need to (un-)learn to navigate the current and future crises we are facing.
Tereza Čajková introduced the methodological approach and pedagogical materials of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (GTDF). This collective works on questions related to historical, systemic, and ongoing colonial violence and the ecological unsustainability of our current habits (or ‘ways of living’). The pedagogical aim of this approach is to support the development of capacities to hold what is difficult, complex, and uncomfortable without feeling overwhelmed or paralysed. And to learn how to navigate relationships in times when a sense of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is increasing.
During the workshop, we explored how the following four denials mark the modern-colonial habit of being:
- denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm: the fact that our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidised by expropriation and exploitation somewhere else
- denial of the limits of the planet: the fact that a finite planet cannot sustain infinite growth and consumption
- the denial of entanglement: our insistence on seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land, rather than “entangled” within a living socio-ecological metabolism
- the denial of the magnitude and complexity of the problem: the difficulties we will need to face together.
These denials can be understood as defences against the social and ecological realities of our situation. Consequently, the GTDF collective suggests that if what is at the core of our global problems is denial rather than ignorance, as educators, we need to consider a very different kind of educational and methodological approach.
For the standard mode of modern education, the GTDF collective uses an analogy of ‘filling up cups’ with knowledge, competencies and skills to address ignorance, or an image of a person climbing or conquering a peak, where learners are prepared to arrive at a state of mastery, readiness and confidence to function in a given world. These types of education focusing on personal empowerment and mastery of knowledge and skills are termed “mastery education”.
However, as the world in crisis is turning into an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous place, we need to learn how to navigate unpredictable realities, doing so with a deep social and ecological accountability.
The GTDF collective proposes a “depth education” approach to address the denials in a way that centres neither the teacher nor the learner but the world itself. This approach sees the role of education h as developing capacities and stamina to stay with the complexities and difficulties that we tend to resist or run away from and to learn to practice how to disarm and de-emphasise the ego.
Rather than focusing on ‘content’, depth education focuses on creating social-pedagogical ‘containers’ that can hold difference, discomfort and dissensus in generative ways. Without these containers, we may be left with superficial engagements that tend to fall apart when tensions and disagreements surface.
As an example of the depth education approach, we experienced the Education 2048 exercise. This pedagogical experiment intends to clear space and build collective capacity to reflect on the role of education in confronting the potential or likelihood of social and ecological collapse in (and/or beyond) our lifetimes. It is a head and heart experiment that opens essential questions. For example, how to educate for human responsibility considering the needs of the next seven generations of humans and non-humans alike?
The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant negative impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
At this moment in time, we need to deeply question what and how we learn, without any certainty that we now know better, but with the commitment to learn from the violence, unsustainability, and repeated mistakes of the past so that we only make different mistakes in the future.
