Critique, creation, imagination

Session V

This session……

The picture so farReview theoretical tools from last weekWitnessing educational realities – narratives

of oppressionInterrogating the narrativesCASE STUDIESAlternative EFA declarations

The picture so far

Discourses

Oppositional postmodernism

Standpoint theory

Others

EFA

Education agendas

MDGs

LEGACIES

CRITIQUES fromEducational realities / failures

Theoretical tools to critique with

Discourses (based on post-structuralism)

Standpoint theory (comes out of feminism)

Oppositional postmodernism (De Sousa Santos’ work)

Many others you can look to ……Marxist critiqueReligious critique (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist...)

Critiques always use ideas as tools to understand/analyse/interrogate. Research always theory based as well as empirical.

Discourses

This approach looks at what ideas of ‘truth’ are powerful or dominant in a given situation. It seeks to understand what implicit or explicit understandings or key ideas are being held. It seeks to understand where these ideas have come from – to trace the history of these ideas. It also seeks to trace how these ‘regimes of truth’ impact on people –how people’s lives are ‘ created’ in certain ways (and not others) by these ideas. This approach will ask these questions of education:

What understandings of education / learning / teacher / development etc. are being used?

How have these ideas shaped this narrative?Who benefits and who loses from such a ‘regime’?

Standpoint theory

This approach seeks to understand a situation from a particular standpoint. It believes that the experiences gained by being located in a particular position in society, gives critical insights. It is interested in ‘voices’ – whose ‘voices’ are heard when we try to understand a situation. It believes that there are share understandings by members of a group that can be used to transform a situation. This approach will ask these questions of education:

What are the views of this person/group?What do their experiences tell us tat we didn’t know

already?How can we make the lived realities of this group better?

Oppositional Postmodernism

This is a ‘critical theory’. It is interested not in explaining the world as it is, but in understanding why the world isn’t what it might be. It is interested in listening for, and talking into the silences of what the world might be. It is sensitive to what is not being said, as well as what is. It seeks to imagine multiple different, more equitable worlds, and ask how we might use our creativity to create them. It is a sociology of the ‘not yet’. This approach will ask these questions of education:

What is being taken for granted here?What are the alternatives to these taken for granted

features?What stops us realising these alternatives?

Witnessing educational realities narratives of oppression

Personal narratives offer a more complex understanding than statistics, or policies.

People live out the realities that are created by the policies of the powerful . In poststructuralist language – people’s subjectivities (identities) are created by the dominant discourses.

We can look at the biographies to understand the connection between individual lives and wider social forces

We can choose to look at not only those lives for whom the current educational system works, but for whom it doesn’t

Interrogating a narrative

Listen to this story with an ear to the questions that each of the 3 theoretical approaches ask of a situation

Interrogate the situation (me) to get a critical understanding.

What is the ‘problem’?

What solutions would you propose?

Stanzin: All alone in Saboo Village classrooom

Your Case Studies

In your case study groups, so a similar exercise.

Choose one person who knows the situation the best to be in the ‘hotseat’

Others interrogate for as long as necessary. Think about the sorts of questions that out theories would ask

Discuss to create an understanding of the problem and of the potential solution

Present this to the whole group

Alternative EFA declarations

Read through the EFA declarations. Think about them in terms of they relate to the personal biography and critique that you have been looking at.

Draft an alternative Declaration, and if possible goals that would be relevant/appropriate/helpful for this person