[spectre] Pedagogical Faultlines (workshop, 21/22 September, Amsterdam)

[Geert Lovink]

Pedagogical Faultlines
International Workshop on Alternatives in Education

On 21 and 22 September 2007, a workshop will be organized by Waag 
Society, Sarai (India) and the Institute of Network Cultures in 
Amsterdam.

URL: http://www.waag.org/project/faultlines (Dutch and English version 
available).

You can find more background in this email below. The full program will 
be available early July.

Four themes will be tackled at the conference:

Extra-institutional Pedagogy
New Sources of Knowledge
Social Knowledge and Professional Practice
Multi-site Practices

The conference is of high level. The conference is meant for advanced 
people from the educational field. They will participate in the 2-day 
conference/workshop.

Regarding the 2-day event the different speakers from India, Brazil and 
the Netherlands can fill in their session. We are thinking of a 
different way of approaching the event than the usual concept: a speech 
and at the end questions. It would be interesting to make it more 
participative and interactive, since we are here to discuss different, 
experimental, innovative, creative ways of conveying knowledge, thus we 
should also try it here. An idea is to request the different speakers 
new ways to convey their messages.

One idea is to start of with a general introduction concerning the 
topic of the session; next the various speakers could prepare an 
interactive session regarding their educational field.For example it 
would be interesting how CRIT [Collective Research Initiatives Trust] 
actually teaches students about architecture, but how can you teach 
cities? How do you ask youth from the Bijlmer to tell something about 
their lives, try to put yourself in their position and tell your own 
life story?

It would be even more interesting if we could have interactive sessions 
with participants and the concerning students, to see what they learn, 
how they learn. Speakers could try to bring audiovisuals, or maybe even 
a mobile version of their educational toolkit, so that participants can 
experiment hands on with the various educational methods.

Because of the limited capacity it is recommended that you register in 
time. Please write to: lipika at waag.org.

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PEDAGOGICAL FAULTLINES
A workshop on issues in learning practices and knowledge creation in 
the contemporary

Themes

1) Extra - institutional Pedagogy

Emerging from crisis within formal educational structures, pedagogical 
practices have been forced to move into more ‘informal networks’, 
intimating new possibilities of pedagogical forms, structures, 
resources and practices. These are sites that open up the question 
around the "professionalisation" of pedagogical purposes and also the 
nature of the pedagogical intervention, where the role of the teacher 
and the learner are routinely destabilized. Traditionally, the 
development discourse around knowledge has been in terms of knowledge 
transfer (from the more knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable) and 
access (for the ‘knowledge deprived’ to ‘information resources’). This 
rubric of the programme would suggest instead the need to move away 
from the paradigm of ‘transfer and access’ towards paying more 
attention to the processes of generating and sustaining different forms 
of socially situated creativity and knowledge. The crucial question 
that lingers within these practices could be framed as - are these 
sites for ways of living in the world or are these just another adjunct 
to learning to prepare for the world?

2) New Sources of Knowledge

Over the last decade we have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in 
the sites and modalities of knowledge production and access. This 
expansion has gestured towards new questions around the authority of 
knowledge producers and validity of what would be considered as 
knowledge. The question of establishing trust in open formats, of 
intellectual integrity and property, of sharing and plagiarism are all 
opened up once we enter the world of blogs and wikis, google downloads 
and non-moderated discussion lists. Similarly hard questions face us 
when we consider the worlds of ‘traditional knowledge’, once derided by 
science but increasingly valorized by those in search of alternatives 
to the contemporary, that may or may not share the modern practices of 
standardization and validation of knowledge. The traffic of content 
across languages and cultures through translation, available both in 
print and through lists and blogs, provides a third context to think 
about new domains of knowledge, this time in the vernacular worlds that 
have adapted new media technologies to their own purpose. It is not 
enough to bring down the canon. The big challenge would be to 
conceptualize the dialogical nature of these knowledge formations, 
keeping alive their internal modes of debate, inconsistencies, 
conflicts, discussions, contradictions and difference.

3) Social Knowledge and Professional Practice

The making of professional practices draws simultaneously upon 
theoretical and practical knowledge. However, the technical and the 
social, theoretical and practical coexist not in synchrony but in 
tension, with pedagogical practices comfortable with one or the other. 
The choice of the technical seeks a neutral, scientific ground while 
many accounts opting for social and practice based knowledge often 
adopt a populist anti-intellectual agenda. The professional seeks to 
discredit ‘lay knowledges’ while the experiential strives to establish 
itself as the ground of authenticity, privileging the experience of 
distinct social groups over any universal conception of 
‘truth’. Further, these tensions play themselves out very differently 
in various institutional geographies. The debates in this realm are 
simultaneously about power, identity and the nature of modernity in 
various parts of the globe and together they pose some of the most 
significant challenges to the making of global democratic futures. This 
thematic will thus address the tensions between social knowledge and 
professional practice as these are taught and experienced in particular 
disciplines and across different institutional sites with a view to 
linking the question of pedagogy with issues of power and authority, 
cultural sensibilities and the multiple ways in which we dwell in the 
contemporary.

4) Multi-site Practices

It is a given that people, concepts and practices travel. 
Conceptualizing multi-site practices in education oscillates between 
the ease of global transfer of best practices and the utter 
impossibility of translations across cultural boundaries. This raises 
the problem of the travel of situated practices of pedagogy that 
address similar concerns and common questions enabling provocations and 
inspirations and thus substituting model building exercises for 
culturally sensitive pedagogical practices that dialogue through their 
difference. Multi-site pedagogical practices is not simply an 
invitation to collecting and adding new sites, of arching the different 
worlds that exists in any given present, but allowing these various 
selves to collide with and infiltrate each other, without the 
privileging of any one self over the other. This disturbing, intimate 
friction creates new enabling contexts that allow us to imagine the 
possibility of a critical and reflective practice of development. In 
other words, what is at stake is the fashioning of new terms of 
dialogue that allow for mutual learning and sharing across diverse 
social and spatial locations, experimenting not only with the 
production of content but also the forms and networks through which 
these circulate.