I came back to school to learn. On the face of it, this sounds ridiculously obvious- why else does someone go to postgraduate school? In practice, I’ve found that we return or continue school for reasons often not related to learning, but rather to advancing or achieving or for status or for salary or for a myriad of benefits that aren’t learning.

When people back home would ask me what I was going back to school for, I had a hard time articulating myself. I already had a Master’s degree in Education and I’d already achieved my wildest career dreams- why go back to school? A few of the answers I stumbled over leading to my enrollment:

• I want to stay on the cutting edge of my work
• I want to understand the students I work with
• I want to peer into the future
• I want to challenge myself
• I want to go to a school in Europe and figure out how the rest of the world is approaching and solving problems

None of these reasons were outright wrong, but none of them felt right, either. I knew I’d come back to school to find that spark and to approach class without a care for my grades, my CV, or advancing my career (AKA getting a better job or promotion). I was confident I’d KNOW why I was back when I saw it, but that’s about the least compelling “why” statement you could imagine.

Last week, in our readings for my Future of Learning Organizations course, we were assigned an article by Neil Selwyn discussing the roles of ed-tech and the education sector in fighting climate change and all the other apocalypse adjacent shit the world is currently facing. Tucked into this article was a reference to Ulrich Beck’s “emancipatory catastrophism,” which Selwyn summarized in the article as anticipating future catastrophes and using these catastrophes to engage in collective action in the present as a means of of preventing the future from being realized.  Basically, Beck was putting a name to Back to the Future’s Marty McFly seeing Biff Tannen become super mogul casino shark Biff (catastrophe) and teaming up with Doc (collective action) to do everything in their power to keep that future from happening.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this idea since I read it, to the detriment of work in my other classes. THIS is why I had come back to school- to be engrossed in an idea I did not know existed two weeks ago. I knew it when I saw it.

For now, per the assignment to write this post, I don’t know what I want to research or what my time in Ediburgh will produce, but I know I’m interested in the following:

• Workplace sustainability for teachers
• Workplace sustainability for public (charity) sector employees
• The complete lack of human capital management training for K-12 school leaders
• Emancipatory Catastrophism and the power of glass half empty people to change the world
• Choice architecture as a means to increase college completion rates in the USA
• Fact checking social media memes about education. Example: do students in the USA really wear hoodies in super hot weather all the time?

Emancipatory Catastrophism / Pause. by is licensed under a