Pedagogies of transformation: keeping hope alive in troubled times

Abstract

This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for a different temporality of learning and school change. Indeed, the paper argues that there is a pressing need for progressive educational change and that ideas are an important component for such change and for rethinking practices, although not enough in and of themselves. The paper works with a broad Enlightenment construction of pedagogies and a conception of school reform framed by values of democratic citizenship and social responsibility and the need to connect with school communities, especially those communities disadvantaged by contemporary economic and policy settings. In disadvantaged communities, schools and teachers need to work with community funds of knowledge to scaffold to valorised high status school knowledge. The school also needs to function as a quasi democratic polis, while the reach of curriculum needs to be global. The focus of the paper is thinking about new pedagogies of teaching and school change as resources for hope.

Keywords:

• authentic learning
• hope pedagogies
• school change
• world crises

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleague Dr Sam Sellar for his assistance with editing and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. This is a concept of design that recognises the agency of actors. In this way, it is very different from the concept of design and a conception of the population as ‘designed’, which the cultural critic Hal Foster (2002) has written about almost as a dystopia, a world of ‘total design’ from designer genes to jeans and an extreme of consumer capitalism.