Keynote Speakers
dr. Gert Biesta
Department of Education of Brunel University London, England
Gert Biesta is currently part-time Professor of Education at the Department of Education of Brunel University London, and Visiting Professor (Art Education) at Artez, Institute of the Arts, Arnhem, The Netherlands. He also has a Visiting Affiliation with NLA University College, Bergen, Norway. Before this he worked at universities in Luxembourg, Scotland (University of Stirling), England (University of Exeter), and the Netherlands (Utrecht, Leiden and Groningen). He is is joint-coordinator of SIG 25 (Educational Theory) of EARLI, and co-editor of two book-series with Routledge: New Directions in the Philosophy of Education (with Michael A. Peters) and Theorizing Education (with Julie Allan and Richard Edwards).
Keynote Presentation:
When learning becomes the problem: Action, community and democracy beyond learning?
When we look back at the history of adult education we can clearly identify a time when learning was an empowering concept that was located on the side of emancipatory politics and progressive action. Yet over the past decades, probably from the 1990s onwards, learning seems to have moved position and may have become part of the problem. Rather than an avenue for empowerment and emancipation it may have become another governmental technology, one that domesticates rather than liberates. In my presentation I wish to reflect on this shift, discuss some of its manifestations (including the problematic role of the language of learning in education and the way in which learning has become colonised by constructivist assumptions and intuitions), in order to ask whether there is still a future for learning or whether there may be a need to move ‘beyond learning.’ In engaging with this question I will particularly explore the relationship between democracy, teaching and the question as to what it means to exist in the world in a grown-up way.
Department of Education of Brunel University London, England
Gert Biesta is currently part-time Professor of Education at the Department of Education of Brunel University London, and Visiting Professor (Art Education) at Artez, Institute of the Arts, Arnhem, The Netherlands. He also has a Visiting Affiliation with NLA University College, Bergen, Norway. Before this he worked at universities in Luxembourg, Scotland (University of Stirling), England (University of Exeter), and the Netherlands (Utrecht, Leiden and Groningen). He is is joint-coordinator of SIG 25 (Educational Theory) of EARLI, and co-editor of two book-series with Routledge: New Directions in the Philosophy of Education (with Michael A. Peters) and Theorizing Education (with Julie Allan and Richard Edwards).
Keynote Presentation:
When learning becomes the problem: Action, community and democracy beyond learning?
When we look back at the history of adult education we can clearly identify a time when learning was an empowering concept that was located on the side of emancipatory politics and progressive action. Yet over the past decades, probably from the 1990s onwards, learning seems to have moved position and may have become part of the problem. Rather than an avenue for empowerment and emancipation it may have become another governmental technology, one that domesticates rather than liberates. In my presentation I wish to reflect on this shift, discuss some of its manifestations (including the problematic role of the language of learning in education and the way in which learning has become colonised by constructivist assumptions and intuitions), in order to ask whether there is still a future for learning or whether there may be a need to move ‘beyond learning.’ In engaging with this question I will particularly explore the relationship between democracy, teaching and the question as to what it means to exist in the world in a grown-up way.
dr. Danny Wildemeersch
Laboratory for Education and Society, Leuven, Belgium
Danny Wildemeersch currently is an emeritus professor of ‘Social, Intercultural and Comparative Education’ at the University of Leuven in Belgium (1986 – now). He was also a full professor of ‘Social Pedagogy and Andragogy’ at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (1994-2002). He is connected to the K.U. Leuven Research Centre on Education, Culture and Society. His research focuses on a variety of themes such as intercultural education, education and social participation, citizenship education, environmental education, transitions from school to work, participation in development cooperation. His has taught a variety of subjects such as adult education, global and intercultural education, social pedagogy and andragogy.
Keynote Presentation:
Is this a failure? Exploring the Largo Santa Philomena Experiment in the Greater Lisbon Area (Portugal)
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from GESTUAL, a research centre in the Faculty of Architecture at the Lisbon Technical University, were engaged for a year in 2013-2014 in a research project in the neighbourhood Cova da Moura in the Amadora Commune, near the city of Lisbon. This neighbourhood has a controversial reputation in the Greater Lisbon area and beyond. The issue of the survival of the neighbourhood has been, since its initial establishment in the nineteen seventies, the subject of a dramatic political controversy going in different directions, depending on the shifts in social, economic and political developments and power balances. This controversy symbolizes the continued conflicts in the commune and in Portuguese society at large about the question ‘who has the right to the city: the landlords, the property owners, the occupants, the authorities, the local associations?’. Today, the neighbourhood still survives, mainly thanks to the continued creative commitment of community associations, of external supporters like GESTUAL, and a shifting degree of lenience on behalf of the authorities. The idea was that a team composed of a designer, a filmmaker, two architects and an anthropologist, would invite neighbourhood dwellers to participate in three workshops throughout the year focusing mainly on the possible redesigning of a small square in the neighbourhood (the largo Santa Philomena). The workshops were expected to constitute a space ‘for reflection about the themes of the qualification agenda and prospects of transformation’. In line with this, it was hoped that creative ideas would emerge on how the largo could be transformed into a space that adds quality to the lived environment. Participatory initiatives in the context of urban planning are often meant to bring together inhabitants and other actors such as experts and representatives of the authorities, in order to achieve consensus on how a space, a built environment, a road infrastructure, or a housing project can be designed and developed. Hence, the non-achievement of consensus at the end of the project, could be considered a failure. The researchers intentionally tried to avoid such pitfall, since their aim was to create a ‘laboratory’ or a ‘reflection space’, rather than achieving a plan or a design which every actor was expected to agree on.
However, throughout the process some hope emerged, mainly within the research team, that particular concrete proposals would, with the support of a majority of the inhabitants, acquire enough legitimacy to be brought to a higher level of decision-making. In spite of the relentless efforts of the researchers such hope was not fulfilled by the end of the project. The different proposals about a possible new design of the largo did not acquire an agreement. Suggestions to integrate the divergent ideas that came to the fore (a playground for children combined with a parking lot and a green meeting place for the inhabitants of the area) encountered strong opposition from some of the inhabitants preferring to keep the space in its original state.
I have had the opportunity to observe the process of this action research initiative at several occasions and to have intense conversations with the researchers throughout and after the process; In my presentation I will try to find an answer to the question whether the lack of results of the efforts of the action-research team can be considered a failure. I will in the first place look for answers in the first place with the help of two authors who have strongly influenced my thinking on adult and community education in recent years, namely Jacques Ranciere and Chantal Mouffe
Laboratory for Education and Society, Leuven, Belgium
Danny Wildemeersch currently is an emeritus professor of ‘Social, Intercultural and Comparative Education’ at the University of Leuven in Belgium (1986 – now). He was also a full professor of ‘Social Pedagogy and Andragogy’ at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (1994-2002). He is connected to the K.U. Leuven Research Centre on Education, Culture and Society. His research focuses on a variety of themes such as intercultural education, education and social participation, citizenship education, environmental education, transitions from school to work, participation in development cooperation. His has taught a variety of subjects such as adult education, global and intercultural education, social pedagogy and andragogy.
Keynote Presentation:
Is this a failure? Exploring the Largo Santa Philomena Experiment in the Greater Lisbon Area (Portugal)
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from GESTUAL, a research centre in the Faculty of Architecture at the Lisbon Technical University, were engaged for a year in 2013-2014 in a research project in the neighbourhood Cova da Moura in the Amadora Commune, near the city of Lisbon. This neighbourhood has a controversial reputation in the Greater Lisbon area and beyond. The issue of the survival of the neighbourhood has been, since its initial establishment in the nineteen seventies, the subject of a dramatic political controversy going in different directions, depending on the shifts in social, economic and political developments and power balances. This controversy symbolizes the continued conflicts in the commune and in Portuguese society at large about the question ‘who has the right to the city: the landlords, the property owners, the occupants, the authorities, the local associations?’. Today, the neighbourhood still survives, mainly thanks to the continued creative commitment of community associations, of external supporters like GESTUAL, and a shifting degree of lenience on behalf of the authorities. The idea was that a team composed of a designer, a filmmaker, two architects and an anthropologist, would invite neighbourhood dwellers to participate in three workshops throughout the year focusing mainly on the possible redesigning of a small square in the neighbourhood (the largo Santa Philomena). The workshops were expected to constitute a space ‘for reflection about the themes of the qualification agenda and prospects of transformation’. In line with this, it was hoped that creative ideas would emerge on how the largo could be transformed into a space that adds quality to the lived environment. Participatory initiatives in the context of urban planning are often meant to bring together inhabitants and other actors such as experts and representatives of the authorities, in order to achieve consensus on how a space, a built environment, a road infrastructure, or a housing project can be designed and developed. Hence, the non-achievement of consensus at the end of the project, could be considered a failure. The researchers intentionally tried to avoid such pitfall, since their aim was to create a ‘laboratory’ or a ‘reflection space’, rather than achieving a plan or a design which every actor was expected to agree on.
However, throughout the process some hope emerged, mainly within the research team, that particular concrete proposals would, with the support of a majority of the inhabitants, acquire enough legitimacy to be brought to a higher level of decision-making. In spite of the relentless efforts of the researchers such hope was not fulfilled by the end of the project. The different proposals about a possible new design of the largo did not acquire an agreement. Suggestions to integrate the divergent ideas that came to the fore (a playground for children combined with a parking lot and a green meeting place for the inhabitants of the area) encountered strong opposition from some of the inhabitants preferring to keep the space in its original state.
I have had the opportunity to observe the process of this action research initiative at several occasions and to have intense conversations with the researchers throughout and after the process; In my presentation I will try to find an answer to the question whether the lack of results of the efforts of the action-research team can be considered a failure. I will in the first place look for answers in the first place with the help of two authors who have strongly influenced my thinking on adult and community education in recent years, namely Jacques Ranciere and Chantal Mouffe
Photo by: Blaž Samec
dr. Marta Gregorčič
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Marta Gregorčič is an assistant professor of cultural studies and has a PhD in sociology. After seventeen years of working closely with Slovenian and foreign science institutions, development programs, emancipation movements and rebellious organizations in peripheral capitalist countries, she has published seven books, over fifty scientific and scholarly articles, worked as an editor for numerous publications and lectured at various international conferences. Her last theoretical work is Potencia. Samoživost revolucionarnih bojev (Potencia. Autogenous revolutionary struggles, Založba */cf, Ljubljana, 2011). Due to her vast experience in field work in Europe, Latin America and Asia, she has great influence within scientific and research programs while still remaining an activist with a high sensibility for exposing modern-day oppression, being taken for granted, ideologies, resignation and ignorance.
Keynote Presentation:
Education for Social Change: The Producing Struggles of Self-organized Communities – Potencias
Contemporary theories dealing with wider social change claim that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that no one today is able to think one and that social change (if at all) will only begin to take place once the humankind is driven to the brink of extinction, which is supposedly already happening on the periphery of capitalism. The lecture “Education for social change”, however, presents quite the opposite thesis, proving on the basis of valuable contributions from revolutionary struggles in Asia and Latin America that alternative, autonomous, self-sufficient and self-determining systems have been created for decades by potencia bottom-up movements, activities and intensities of grupos de base struggles, and the self-organized pueblo, a people fighting beyond the remains of the old and the new oligarchies. It does not discuss potencia in general – in terms of revolts, the creation of alternative policies or emancipation practices, but rather in terms of autogenous revolutionary struggles responding to real, immediate needs of the community and already producing new principles, processes and requirements from within, whereby they do not only meet the basic human needs, i. e. the material conditions for life, but mostly create the social, cultural, economic, environmental and political pre-conditions of sociality.
What is the role of education in the potencias? Everyday community education for revolutionary struggle by each member of the community is core of the potencias, potencias as subjectivities of those who create undermine what neoliberalism wanted to rule out at all costs and with every possible means – the sociality. That is why potencias always develop alternative education systems, new forms and methods of education that are complex, demanding sometimes even unthinkable and are always revolutionary. Education for social change drives from theories (social ecology, critical theory, Freire philosophy, etc.) and practices (education by the Mexican Zapatistas movement, Indian Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha movement, etc.). It discusses sociality and preconditions for the sociality in our time, which is, following social ecologists, not complex, but absurdly simplified. It is always easier to live and reproduce a linear, rather uncomplicated and undemanding system of social co-existence than create something that would demand uncertainty, tireless search for consensus, every day education, development for the whole community, etc. What has been done in this regard on the periphery of capitalism and what can be shown in Slovenia?
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Marta Gregorčič is an assistant professor of cultural studies and has a PhD in sociology. After seventeen years of working closely with Slovenian and foreign science institutions, development programs, emancipation movements and rebellious organizations in peripheral capitalist countries, she has published seven books, over fifty scientific and scholarly articles, worked as an editor for numerous publications and lectured at various international conferences. Her last theoretical work is Potencia. Samoživost revolucionarnih bojev (Potencia. Autogenous revolutionary struggles, Založba */cf, Ljubljana, 2011). Due to her vast experience in field work in Europe, Latin America and Asia, she has great influence within scientific and research programs while still remaining an activist with a high sensibility for exposing modern-day oppression, being taken for granted, ideologies, resignation and ignorance.
Keynote Presentation:
Education for Social Change: The Producing Struggles of Self-organized Communities – Potencias
Contemporary theories dealing with wider social change claim that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that no one today is able to think one and that social change (if at all) will only begin to take place once the humankind is driven to the brink of extinction, which is supposedly already happening on the periphery of capitalism. The lecture “Education for social change”, however, presents quite the opposite thesis, proving on the basis of valuable contributions from revolutionary struggles in Asia and Latin America that alternative, autonomous, self-sufficient and self-determining systems have been created for decades by potencia bottom-up movements, activities and intensities of grupos de base struggles, and the self-organized pueblo, a people fighting beyond the remains of the old and the new oligarchies. It does not discuss potencia in general – in terms of revolts, the creation of alternative policies or emancipation practices, but rather in terms of autogenous revolutionary struggles responding to real, immediate needs of the community and already producing new principles, processes and requirements from within, whereby they do not only meet the basic human needs, i. e. the material conditions for life, but mostly create the social, cultural, economic, environmental and political pre-conditions of sociality.
What is the role of education in the potencias? Everyday community education for revolutionary struggle by each member of the community is core of the potencias, potencias as subjectivities of those who create undermine what neoliberalism wanted to rule out at all costs and with every possible means – the sociality. That is why potencias always develop alternative education systems, new forms and methods of education that are complex, demanding sometimes even unthinkable and are always revolutionary. Education for social change drives from theories (social ecology, critical theory, Freire philosophy, etc.) and practices (education by the Mexican Zapatistas movement, Indian Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha movement, etc.). It discusses sociality and preconditions for the sociality in our time, which is, following social ecologists, not complex, but absurdly simplified. It is always easier to live and reproduce a linear, rather uncomplicated and undemanding system of social co-existence than create something that would demand uncertainty, tireless search for consensus, every day education, development for the whole community, etc. What has been done in this regard on the periphery of capitalism and what can be shown in Slovenia?