Educating the Commons and Commoning Education: Thinking Radical Education with Radical Technology

All over the world, education—which could be understood as a universal right and public good—is facing processes of economization and privatization. Technology—which could be understood as a common means of production, collaboratively developed—is taken away from the public and put into corporate hands. This article is designed as a conversation investigating the question of shared and common knowledge from the perspectives of an educator and an engineer, respectively. The dialogue explores necessary convergences in radical practices of commoning, and possible future strategies for education and Open Technology. It asks how new models can challenge the neoliberal agenda and move away from established policies, and how a collective re-appropriation of the means of production could emerge within a post-digital society.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology developed and popularised by public sociologist Michael Burawoy, which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It also discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. The chapter explains how the dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education and the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, whose influence is fundamental to diverse forms of radical education. It describes the value of the knowledge that the poor bring to the educational context and challenges the oppression that kept them in poverty.

Fragmentos de acções pedagógicas: arte, educação e curadoria

ResumoPartindo do projecto de investigação “Artistas e Educação Radical na América Latina, Anos 1960 e 1970” — que visa explorar as relações entre arte e pedagogia desenvolvidas por mulheres artistas, e que está em curso desde 2018, tendo como instituição de acolhimento o Instituto de História da Arte da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa —, este artigo procura problematizar e abrir um espaço de reflexão sobre os modos de representação, em contexto expositivo, de experiências pedagógicas determinadas por uma dimensão colaborativa e relacional, e das quais restam essencialmente memórias e alguma documentação.AbstractDrawing from the research project “Artists and Radical Education in Latin America, 1960s and 1970s” – which aims to explore the relations between art and pedagogy developed by women artists and that started in 2018, being hosted by the Instituto de História da Arte of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa –, this paper seeks to discuss and open a space for debate on the formats of representation, in an expository context, of pedagogical experiences determined by a collaborative and relational dimension, and of which essentially remain memories and some documentation.

Student Movements in Latin America: Decolonizing and Feminizing Education and Life

Student movements and radical education collectives across Latin America, building on traditions of radical, popular, feminist, and Indigenizing education, are seeking the democratization of the politics of knowledge and education in their regional contexts. Drawing on the cases of Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, it is possible to map and conceptualize a clear autonomous/decolonizing strand within the broader weaving of students’ movements, looking at the pedagogies of emancipation that underpin and are emergent in their praxis. The process of researching such movements and their politics of knowledge involves a decolonizing and pedagogical approach that embeds the co-creation of knowledges for transformation between researcher and movements. This builds upon work related to prefigurative epistemologies and decolonizing pedagogies of movement scholars such as Motta, Bermúdez, and Valenzuela Fuentes. It foregrounds the work of Neplanteras, of whom Gloria Anzaldúa speaks, those who bridge communities, sociabilities, epistemologies, and subjects on the margins. Nepantleras, as Anzaldúa continues, “are threshold people, those who move within and among multiple worlds and use their movements in the service of transformation.” Our collaborative research as Nepantleras has identified three broad themes emergent across these political and deeply pedagogical educational struggles and experiences. First is the practices, ethics, and experiences that foreground the prefigurative and horizontal nature of the politics of decolonizing and autonomous knowledge being co-created. Second is the feminization of resistance, involving both the emergence and centering of women and feminized subjects in movement and collective struggles, and the feminization of politics and knowledge making. Third is the key role played by affect and an embodied/enfleshed politics in the three cases, and how they foster the democratization, feminization, and decolonization of education and everyday life.

Radical reform and reforming radicals in Australian schooling

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider historical shifts in the mobilisation of the concept of radical in relation to Australian schooling. Design/methodology/approach Two texts composed at two distinct points in a 40-year period in Australia relating to radicalism and education are strategically juxtaposed. These texts are: the first issue of the Radical Education Dossier (RED, 1976), and the Attorney General Department’s publication Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation in Australia (PVERA, 2015). The analysis of the term radical in these texts is influenced by Raymond Williams’s examination of particular keywords in their historical and contemporary contexts. Findings Across these two texts, radical is deployed as adjective for a process of interrogating structured inequalities of the economy and employment, and as individualised noun attached to the “vulnerable” young person. Social implications Reading the first issue of RED alongside the PVERA text suggests the consequences of the reconstitution of the role of schools, teachers and the re-positioning of certain young people as “vulnerable”. The juxtaposition of these two texts surfaces contemporary patterns of the therapeutisation of political concerns. Originality/value A methodological contribution is offered to historical sociological analyses of shifts and continuities of the role of the school in relation to society.