Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age 1 (original) (raw)
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Following the works of Freire, Giroux, Brookfield, and Shor, among others, we collectively seek to consider ways in which we can make intentional space for critical pedagogy and implement best practices which challenge ourselves, our students, and the institutions and communities in which we operate. We endeavour to create an alternative pedagogical ecosystem that challenges the neoliberal rhetoric that has become enmeshed in the academy. The aim of our workshop is fourfold: (1) To reconsider the definition of pedagogical space in tertiary institutions as one that confronts, rather than conforms to, neoliberal structures. Such structures are embedded in our everyday practice; they are everywhere and difficult to recognize in our familiar environments. This poses a challenge in escaping these norms. (2) To inspire a critical and hopeful dialogue in regard to the exploration of, and collaborative sharing of, critical and creative tools which may enhance our pedagogical practice. (3) T...
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Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope
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As the vast majority of people become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and private solutions become a substitute for systemic change. As the worldly space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public pedagogies and spaces that encourage the exchange of information, opinion and criticism, the horizons of an inclusive and substantive democracy disappear against the growing militarization of public space, the attack on the welfare state, the ongoing commercialization of everyday life, and the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political participation and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Zygmunt Bauman and others the author addresses the current crisis of meaning, political agency and pedagogy, and the implications it has for developing a cultural politics that links utopian thinking not only to the complex nature of social agency and the importance of democratic public spheres, but also to the fact that active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated and socialized into the world of politics. And it is no accident that the renewal of political thought in Western Europe is quickly accompanied by the resurgence of radical 'utopias'. These utopias manifest, first and foremost, awareness of this fundamental fact: institutions are human works. And it is no accident either that, contrary to the poverty in this respect of contemporary 'political philosophy', grand political philosophy from Plato to Rousseau has placed the question of paideia at the center of its interests. Cornelius Castoriadis 1 To speak today of the defense of democracy as if we were defending something which we knew and had possessed for many decades or centuries is self-deception … we should be nearer the mark, and should 1.