This 6-week online course is developed for practitioners of global citizenship education who feel that the current global crises are compelling us to fundamentally question the paradoxes and limits of our current systems in order to be able to imagine something genuinely different.
The course is based on the educational frameworks of the “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures” collective, an international assemblage of educators, artists and researchers committed to de-naturalizing our socially inherited modern/colonial ways of thinking and being. This course offers a basic-level introduction to the work of the collective and is meant for those practitioners of global citizenship education who feel a need to develop the capacity and stamina to learn to sit with difficult questions and wicked problems without needing to be rescued with descriptive and prescriptive solutions.
Rather than offering ready-made solutions for engagement with complex global challenges, this course is directed toward disarming affective landmines (internal and socially inherited resistances) that prevent us from engaging with these challenges with more curiosity, depth and humility. In this sense, the participants in the course will not be taught what to think or what to believe, but will instead be invited to explore different pedagogical strategies of “unlearning” that will help them deepen and complexify their learning process beyond what is usually possible in pre-established institutional settings.
This course will offer the participants the possibility to learn to “dig-deeper” into the paradoxes and contradictions of modern societies and offer some pedagogical tools that can help educators to better map and navigate these paradoxes and contradictions without succumbing to naïve hope, simplistic solutions or despair.
The course will take the form of six on-line sessions (inverted classrooms) over the course of six weeks. The course structure follows the cartography of 4 constitutive denials of modernity: 1) denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm, 2) denial of unsustainability, 3) denial of entanglement and 4) denial of the magnitude of the problem (https://decolonialfutures.net/4denials/), developed by the GTDF collective.
Participants will be required to engage with pedagogical resources/stimuli before each session as the on-line sessions will not be focused on content delivery, but new methodologies for holding conversations that will help participants dive deeper into the unlearning process. Apart from the weekly on-line gatherings, each session will include an invitation to a guided walk that supports deeper engagement with the questions from the program. Participants will also be asked to write a short reflection as an entry after each walk in their learning journals.
Application procedure:
This advanced course is open to Bridge 47 Network members only. Since the course is only suitable for a group of up to 15 participants, we are now inviting all interested Network members to submit a short application form. We will select participants based on the understanding and experience working with critical GCE and/or transformative learning, motivation for the course and diversity. Deadline for application is 28 March 2021. You will be informed of the outcome of the application by 31 March latest. Apply for the course here
The course runs from 4.30-6.30 PM CET on the following days:
6 April, 13 April, 20 April, 27 April, 4 May, 11 May
Provisional course structure
Session 1 (April 6)
Introduction session – Education 2048
Introduction to the overall framework (4 denials), presentation of the program structure, followed by a Q & A.
Immersive scenario “Education 2048” (a fictional head/heart experiment about what kind of Education will be needed in 2048 if humanity continues on its current trajectory), breakout group conversations, closing circle.
Guided walk 1: Dissolving linear time and individuation.
Session 2 (April 13) Denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm
Guiding questions for the session:
How is material prosperity here created by poverty somewhere else? How do poor (or rather, impoverished) countries and peoples subsidize our comforts, securities and pleasures? How do we benefit from exploitation, expropriation and destitution? How are we complicit in harm? How has education contributed to the reinforcement of exploitation and cultural homogenization? Why don’t people talk about this? Why can’t people stop this?
Stimuli: “The Slavery footprint”, “Ecological footprint”, Global wealth Inequality (The Rules), Schooling the world
Guided walk 2: Walking with difficult numbers.
Session 3 (April 20) Denial of unsustainability
Guiding questions for the session:
How are we consuming the planet and making it un-inhabitable? Why do people deny that the current patterns of ecological destruction, consumption and exploitation are unsustainable? How long do we have left? How are we going to face the end of the world as we know it? How does greed work and how could it be interrupted?
Stimuli: The Great Unraveling? Confronting Accelerating Environmental and Social Stresses (video), Preparing for the end of the world as we know it (article in Open Democracy)
Guided walk 3: Connecting with the flowers, the trees, the guns and the toxic waste.
Session 4 (April 27) Denial of entanglement
Guiding questions for the session:
Where does the separation between (hu)man and nature come from? Why do we see ourselves as separate from the Earth and from each other? What are the consequences of thinking and feeling we are separated from nature and from each other? How could Indigenous knowledges and practices inspire us to figure out how to feel interconnected and responsible for everything? How can we engage with Indigenous knowledges and communities without extraction, consumption, appropriation, romanticization or idealization?
Stimuli: Amazon is the vagina of the world (interview with Celia Xakriaba), Against Crisis Epistemology (Kyle Whyte) or Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points (Kyle Whyte), Abuela Grillo
Guided walk 4: Co-sensing with radical tenderness.
Session 5 (May 4) Denial of the size of the problem
Guiding questions for the session:
In relation to our complex human predicament; What are we over-estimating? What we under-estimating? What are we mis-calculating, misjudging and overlooking? What are we not considering at all? What important questions are our modern/colonial fantasies and desires preventing us from asking? What possibilities are they preventing us from imagining? How can we move beyond both naïve hope and desperate hopelessness?
Stimuli: What do you do when there is no hope? A talk with Bayo Akomolafe & Toni Spencer, The Collapse of Ideology and the End of Escape (Jem Bendell), American Psychosis (Chris Hedges)
Guided walk 5: Confronting social and ecological collapse.
Session 6 (May 11) Closing session – the learning so far
So what, now what? Sharing from the learning journals and further steps. Q & A.
Stimulus: Dougald Hine interviewing Vanessa Andreotti for the Climate Sessions.
Guided walk 6: Walking the tight rope.