Within our education and pedagogy cluster we attempted to draw on a number of the diverse, repeating themes that appeared in discussion with the broader group, such as;
- what knowledge counts as authoritative and academic?
- Who is deemed capable of teaching others, and what is the role of the student?
- Why is our learning so divided and compartmentalised into disciplines and specialisms?
- How, and to what effect, can we decolonise education and pedagogy?
- What other hierarchical norms shape our educations, and how can we go beyond them?
The course allowed us all a space for us to reconstruct the ways in which teachers and students can relate to one another, and thus transform how knowledge comes to be shared, and the processes of teaching and learning altered. In doing so, features of what has come to be taken as natural or standard for pedagogical environments were revealed to be unnecessary, or more commonly, damaging to our experience as learners and teachers. We could thus go on to produce a project that would bring these new revelations to light.
By exploring various readings, from Jacques Ranciere’s Ignorant Schoolmaster to bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, we wanted to build a project that could engage a number of these questions in a meaningful way, by drawing on our collective reflections and discussions while also engaging the university community. Initially a project idea built around a form of ethnography and survey of decolonising the curriculum was imagined; talking to students, lectures and staff on the topic and collating their responses to questions on the theme, would allow us to construct an artefact of some kind that would effectively communicate how decolonisation and pedagogy are crucially tied together.
As we progressed further and continued to reflect on these questions, another project began to take shape; a workshop, alike to those we had taken part in during the year, that directly intervened in people’s pedagogical expectations and approaches, allowing for spontaneous shaping of ways of learning and questioning, was our aim. Without leaving behind the urgent question of decolonising curricula, in creating a workshop, which we could pass on to other groups and that could be perpetually expanded, we moved from investigating essential questions of pedagogy to offering a space in which these questions of radical education might be lived, imagined and answered, however briefly. A workshop form for our project allowed us to communicate the ideas we’d been building on throughout the year while leaving our artefact open-ended to transformation for future groups.
