Something at
Stake
Pedagogies of risk in
a globalised world
Ray Land
Durham University
HE As If The World Really Mattered
Edinburgh 25th April 2013
Pedagogies of uncertainty
I would say that without a certain amount of anxiety and
risk, there's a limit to how much learning occurs. One must
have something at stake. No emotional investment, no
intellectual or formational yield.
(Shulman Pedagogies of Uncertainty, 2005:1)
Growth in higher
education spending
1990-2001
growth in scientific
research over the
period 1990-2001
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Speed and acceleration
Uncertainty
Complexity
Multiculturalism
Mobility of the population
Conflict (social, military)
Inter-generational tension
Need for ethical citizenship
Information saturation
Proliferation of knowledge
Globalisation
Internationalisation
Private /public sector tension
Increasing panic
Characteristics of
the 21st century
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Unpredictability
Risk
Need for flexibility and agility
Entitlement v responsibility
Scarcity of resources
Austerity
Sustainability
Need for prudence
Transparency & accountability
Discontinuity and rupture
Shifting paradigms
Poverty v affluence
Outsourcing of jobs
Youthfulness
The dogmas of the
quiet past, are
inadequate to the
stormy present. The
occasion is piled high
with difficulty, and we
must rise with the
occasion.
As our case is new, so
we must think anew
and act anew. We must
disenthrall ourselves …
Abraham Lincoln,
Outline
1. Speed, the unsettling of knowledge & the death of
geography (theory of fast and slow time)
2. Troublesome Knowledge: venturing into strange
places
3. ‘Re-inventing’ students to work across cultural
differences
4. Future pedagogies: risk, dissensus, profusion
1. Speed & the Unsettling of Knowledge
The goal of university research is the creation,
dissemination, and preservation of knowledge.
At Harvard, where so much of our research is of
global significance, we have an essential
responsibility to distribute the fruits of our
scholarship as widely as possible.”
Steven E. Hyman
Provost of Harvard University
digital text – loss of closure and fixity of printed
page– a shift in epistemology
shift in medium implies shift in reading
mode, from literacy to multimodality,
technoliteracy, visual sophistication, (Kress)
shift in reading mode requires a
further shift, in subjectivity (Pelletier)
process
fragmentation
exploration
visual
volatility
fast time
consensus
openness
artefact
cohesion
exposition
textual
stability
slow time
authority
containment
text
stability
individual
private
image
mutability
collective
public
What forms of ‘technoliteracy’ do
we need to work in these
spaces?
How do these texts and
technologies change the way
academic knowledge is produced
and distributed?
volatility and instability of
digital text
infinitely editable, instantly
distributable,
‘These sections of the web break away from the
page metaphor. Rather than following the notion
of the web as book, they are predicated on
microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages.
Wikis are streams of conversation, revision,
amendment, and truncation.’
Alexander, 2006
Textualities, temporalities, power
fast and slow time (Eriksen 2001)
Anything worth doing is worth doing s-l-o-w-l-y ...
‘..smaller, faster,
cheaper .. NASA’
Speed
Virilio 2000, Eriksen 2001, Honoré 2004
supercomplexity
death of geography
issues of democratic space
advent of universal real time
tyranny of the moment
slow and fast time
‘presentified’ history
single gaze of the cyclops
the universal accident
The ‘tyranny of the moment’ - effects of speed
(Eriksen 2001)
speed is an addictive drug
speed leads to simplification
speed creates assembly line (Taylorist) effects
speed leads to a loss of precision
speed demands space (filling in all the available gaps in
the lives of others)
• speed is contagious – when experienced in one domain
the desire for speed tends to spread to new domains.
• gains and losses equal each other out so that increased
speed does not necessarily even lead to greater efficiency.
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Eriksen laments the disappearance of ‘slow’ principles
of order, deliberation, reflection, completeness,
coherence, narrative.
Would the erosion of such principles constitute a
crisis in institutional identity for the university?
The hegemony of the fragment
‘...when growing amounts of information are distributed at
growing speed, it becomes increasingly difficult to create
narratives, orders, developmental sequences. The
fragments threaten to become hegemonic.
This has consequences for the ways we relate to
knowledge, work and lifestyle in a wide sense. Cause and
effect, internal organic growth, maturity and experience;
such categories are under heavy pressure in this situation’
(Eriksen 2001:113).
authority?
gatekeeping – Mark Poster’s
exploration of how digitisation shifts
history as a discipline – breaking
down boundaries – if all historical
resources are ‘googled’, if all history
work is instantly publishable, how
does that affect who counts as an
historian? or a journalist? what is the
role of the university, of the
discipline?
Text to image
History only happens in the present. Today historians are
being pushed around by the media. … Today the media no
longer exists as narratives but rather as flashes and
images.
History is therefore being reduced to images’
(Virilio 1999a:57).
public/private continuum
• displacement of slow time to the private sphere
• home life compromised by 24/7 digital
The risk of the digital:
The DEFRA wiki
the five minute university
Fr. Guido Sarducci, rock critic, l’Osservatore Romano, Vatican.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
...‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ ..?
• Coventry University – 18 month degree ‘lite’ @ £3,500
p.a.
• Buckingham University 2 yr degree.
• Tweets
• Pecha Kucha (‘chit-chat’) - 7 mins, 14 slide
presentations
2. Troublesome Knowledge
Real learning requires
stepping into the unknown,
which initiates a rupture in
knowing...
By definition, all TC
scholarship is concerned
(directly or indirectly) with
encountering the unknown.
Schwartzman 2010 p.38
pax intrantibus, salus exeuntibus (1609)
Threshold Concepts
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world,
whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
Tennyson ‘Ulysses’
The engagement by the learner with an unfamiliar knowledge terrain
and the ensuing reconceptualisation may involve a reconstitution of, or
shift within, the learner’s subjectivity, and perhaps identity.
Ontological implications. Learning as ‘a change in subjectivity’. (Pelletier
2007).
Liminality
• a transformative state that
engages existing certainties
and renders them
problematic, and fluid
• a suspended state in which
understanding can
approximate to a kind of
mimicry or lack of authenticity
• liminality as unsettling –
sense of loss
Characteristics of a
threshold concept
• integrative
• transformative
• irreversible
• bounded
• re-constitutive
• discursive
• troublesome
East of Eden
through the threshold
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them
soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
John Milton (Paradise Lost, Book XII; 1667)
Troublesome knowledge
• ritual knowledge
• inert knowledge
• counter-intuitive
knowledge
• conceptually difficult
knowledge
• the defended learner
• alien knowledge
• tacit knowledge
• loaded knowledge
‘Venturing into
strange places’
'our ignorance expands in
all kinds of directions' (p.250)
Need for creative 'knowing-insitu' and imagination. Mode 3
knowledge where all our
knowledge - of the world, of our
situations, of ourselves is contested.
Pedagogy must be founded on
openness, mutual disclosure,
personal risk and disturbance'
(p.258).
(Barnett 2004: 247-260)
CIHE international /
intercultural attributes
Knowledge
• world geography, conditions, issues and events
• complexity and interdependence of world events &
issues
• understanding of historical forces that have shaped
the current world system
• knowledge of a foreign language, intercultural
communication concepts, international business
etiquette
CIHE international / intercultural GAs
Attitudes
• openness to learning & positive orientation to
new opportunities, ideas and ways of thinking.
• tolerance for ambiguity and unfamiliarity.
• sensitivity & respect for cultural differences.
• empathy or the ability to take multiple
perspectives.
• self-awareness and self esteem about one’s own
identity & culture.
CIHE international / intercultural GAs
Skills
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research skills to learn about the world
critical and comparative thinking skills
ability to think creatively and integrate knowledge
ability to use another language effectively and
interact with people from other cultures
• coping and resiliency skills in unfamiliar and
challenging situations
3. ‘Re-inventing’ Students
For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis,
individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge
emerges only through invention and re-invention,
through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful
inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the
world, and with each other.”
― Paolo Freire 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Interculturalism
Cultural practice
‘The chains of habit
are generally too
small to be felt until
they are too strong to
be broken’.
Dr Samuel Johnson
1709 - 1784
fraught (histrionic) discourse
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the darker side of modernity
epistemic racism
epistemic violence
cultural blindness
epistemic amnesia
abyssal thinking
‘damned’ epistemologies
barbarians of knowledge
discourse of pathology
blood identities
psychic infantilism
Ecological catastrophe
Poverty
(destruction of humanity)
Eurocentrism
Ontology of consumption
Resistance (Impossibility of subsumption
of peoples and cultures)
Abyssal thinking (Santos 2007)
Understanding the historical effects of abyssal lines on
both sides of the line, can help educators recognise the
mechanisms that privilege European / Western
epistemologies and ‘forget’, silence, repress or ‘damn’
‘other’ epistemologies
(from Andreotti 2011)
Valorised perspectives
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Social justice
Equity
Sustainability
Inclusivity
Ecologies of knowledge
Interconnectedness
Interdependence
Decoloniality
Diversality
Re-imagining
Difference
Counter hegemony
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Co-presence
Cognitive justice
Pluralistic propositional thinking
Incompleteness
Inter-knowledges
Situated theoretical approaches
Prudent knowledge
Intervention in the world
Geopolitical relations
Solidarity
Values-based analysis
Border knowledge
Cosmopolitanism
Troubling discourses
Sources of troublesomeness:
perceived barriers to global citizenship or ‘cosmopolitanism’
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Ethnocentricism
Ahistoricism
Depoliticisation
Paternalism
Eurocentrism
Territorial difference
Instrumentalism
Cultural relativism
Epistemic racism
Abyssal thinking
Hegemony
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Subordination of the periphery
Homogenisation
Coloniality of power
Coloniality of being
Dualisms /unhelpful binaries
desiderata
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A transmodern view, re-imagining modernity
An ethics of liberation
Adoption of border positions
Ecologies of knowledge
An alternative thinking of alternatives (Santos 2007 p.10)
A ‘decolonial grammar of critical analysis which would
recognise its own vulnerability’ (Maldonado-Torres 2004 p.52)
• An epistemology of the South
• A ‘general epistemology of the impossibility of a general
epistemology’
• A different locus of enunciation
(where people speak from – ‘I am where I think’)
Desiderata
Liminal spaces of transformation ‘new space in
which dominant social relations, ideologies and
practices are able to be questioned’. (Giroux 1993 p178)
Capacity to move out of socially prescribed positions
‘transformative intellectuals’ (Giroux)
Role of the academic - ‘to complicate things’ (Derrida)
• ‘...each knowledge is both insufficient and interdependent on other knowledges...’ (Santos 2007 p.17)
‘...every theory will only offer a partial and limited
perspective on an issue ...’
(Andreotti 2011)
Research could be a
strong condition that is
aimed at bringing
about supercomplexity
in the minds of
students.
(Barnett 1992 p.623)
What is distinctive about ‘higher’ learning?
“It is furthermore a peculiarity of
the universities that they treat
higher learning always in terms
of not yet completely solved
problems, remaining at all times
in a research mode …
Schools, in contrast, treat only
closed and settled bodies of
knowledge. The relationship
between teacher and learner is
therefore completely different in
higher learning from what it is in
schools. ..”
Wilhelm von Humboldt 1810
What is distinctive about ‘higher’ learning?
“…At the higher level, the
teacher is not there for the sake
of the student, both have their
justification in the service of
scholarship.”
Wilhelm von Humboldt 1810
Idealistic (Humboldtian) approach. (Simons & Elen 2007)
• Research a kind of general education.
• Academic enquiry, morality (edification) and
citizenship are linked.
• University different from schools (social needs) as
well as from research institutions (govt needs,
commercial interests)
• Education at the university solely guided by academic
enquiry (one submits to the tribunal of reason, the
spirit of truth, the force of the better argument.)
• Not influenced by pedagogic expertise or didactics, or
managerial or moral or economic imperatives.
• State and society cannot ask for immediate returns.
successful graduate
responsible citizen
effective employee
Curriculum design and the research-teaching nexus
STUDENT-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS PARTICIPANTS
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
CONTENT
Research-tutored
Research-based
Curriculum emphasises
learning focused on
students writing and
discussing papers or
essays
Curriculum emphasises
students undertaking
inquiry-based learning or
low key research
Research-led
Research-oriented
Curriculum is structured
around teaching subject
content
Curriculum emphasises
teaching processes of
knowledge construction
in the subject
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
PROCESSES
AND
PROBLEMS
TEACHER-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS AUDIENCE
(Healey 2005)
Curriculum design and the research-teaching nexus
STUDENT-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS PARTICIPANTS
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
CONTENT
Research-tutored
Research-based
Curriculum emphasises
learning focused on
students writing and
discussing papers or
essays
Curriculum emphasises
students undertaking
inquiry-based learning or
low key research
Research-led
Research-oriented
Curriculum is structured
around teaching subject
content
Curriculum emphasises
teaching processes of
knowledge construction
in the subject
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
PROCESSES
AND
PROBLEMS
TEACHER-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS AUDIENCE
(Healey 2005)
Curriculum design and the research-teaching nexus
STUDENT-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS PARTICIPANTS
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
CONTENT
Research-tutored
Research-based
Curriculum emphasises
learning focused on
students writing and
discussing papers or
essays
Curriculum emphasises
students undertaking
inquiry-based learning or
low key research
Research-led
Research-oriented
Curriculum is structured
around teaching subject
content
Curriculum emphasises
teaching processes of
knowledge construction
in the subject
EMPHASIS ON
RESEARCH
PROCESSES
AND
PROBLEMS
TEACHER-FOCUSED
STUDENTS AS AUDIENCE
(Healey 2005)
4. Future pedagogies
Pedagogies of risk
I would say that without a certain amount of anxiety and risk,
there's a limit to how much learning occurs. One must have
something at stake. No emotional investment, no intellectual
or formational yield.
(Shulman Pedagogies of Uncertainty, 2005:1)
A pedagogy of ‘dissensus’ (Andreotti 2011 p.395)
A pedagogical emphasis on ‘dissensus’ in order to support
learners in the development of their ability to hold
paradoxes and not be overwhelmed by complexity,
ambiguity, conflict, uncertainty and difference;
Pedagogies of profusion (Lather 2006)
‘proliferation as an ontological and historical claim’
‘“disjunctive affirmation” of multiple ways of going
about educational research in terms of finding our
way into a less comfortable social science full of
stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of
truth, interpretation and responsibility’.
Learning as loss
(Andreotti 2011 p. 393-4)
The implication for education is that educators would
need to let go of the aspiration for fixed blueprints of
futures and ideal societies (projected from a single
worldview to be imposed worldwide) which are
traditionally constitutive of the project of schooling (as
imagined from a European perspective and imposed
around the world). This entails a renegotiation of
epistemic privilege (on this side of the line) that is
pedagogically difficult as it is generally perceived first as a
loss of grounds ,epistemic privilege, and certainties:
chaos, the end of everything ...
‘disjunctive affirmation’ of multiple ways of going about educational research in terms of finding our way into a
less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth,
interpretation and responsibility.
Interpretive pedagogies (Bauman 1989)
To talk to people rather than fight them; to understand
them rather than dismiss or annihilate them as mutants;
to enhance one’s own tradition by drawing freely on
experience from other pools, rather than shutting it off
from the traffic of ideas; that is what the intellectuals’
own tradition, constituted by ongoing discussions,
prepares people to do well.
And the art of civilised conversation is something that the
pluralist world needs badly. It may neglect such an art at
its peril. Converse or perish.
It requires a significant ontological shift
‘The optimism of the
will and the
pessimism of the
intellect’.
Antonio Gramsci
ray.land@durham.ac.uk