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

[director]

Hi Geert,

I can see that the speakers for the "Pedagogical Faultlines,
International Workshop on Alternatives in Education", will
be from Holand, India and Brazil,  but, I think that the
organizers should reconsider this, and wonder if there is a
possibility to invite the Australian Federal Health Minister
Tony Abbott who has suggested a return to corporal
punishment to bring discipline back to schools!
See:
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21904849-948,00.html
(text also below)

Cheers,
Melentie
 
June 15, 2007 07:54am

FEDERAL Health Minister Tony Abbott has suggested a return
to corporal punishment to bring discipline back to schools.

The comments came after Mr Abbott watched footage of an
attack on a Melbourne schoolgirl.

The grainy vision from a mobile phone showed a teenage girl
repeatedly kicked in the head and body by two other
teenagers.

Mr Abbott was alarmed by the footage and said it showed that
discipline in schools was not working.

"I mean, we've taken corporal punishment out of the schools
because we think that's brutal and yet our playgrounds seem
to be becoming more brutal than ever," the minister said on
Channel 9.

"Maybe a little bit more discipline in the schools would
prevent some of the ugliness that we've just seen."

Mr Abbott said it was a different situation in his day.

"When I was a kid at school, if you got up to mischief you
were punished, not severely, but nevertheless you were
punished."

Victoria Police have cautioned two teenage girls over the
assault on a fellow student last year in Melbourne's western
suburbs.

Two students from Copperfield College were expelled
following the attack.

Mobile phone footage of the brawl first circulated last year
and aired again on television on Wednesday night.

AAP


> 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.
> 
> ---
> 
> 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.
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