Well, I don’t know about the University of Pennsylvania, but where I live and work, brainstorming sessions always combine different elements that seek to benefit both from the creativity of individuals and the collective wisdom of the group. Against this experience, much of the study itself is pretty unamusing, but the graphical illustration of applying extreme value theory to processes of idea generation is interesting nonetheless:

In looking at the best idea generated—rather than the average quality of ideas—the authors identify four factors underlying the performance of the idea generation process:

“We build theory that relates previously observed group behaviour to four different variables that characterize the creative problem solving process: (1) the average quality of ideas generated, (2) the number of ideas generated, (3) the variance in the quality of ideas generated, and (4) the ability of the group to discern the quality of the ideas.”

Yet, it also is a somewhat mystic text – Bloom himself considered the original handbook “one of the most widely cited yet least read books in American education” – Bloom, Benjamin (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals New York: David McKay.

And indeed, while the 1956 publication (subtitled: Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain) focused on cognitive aspects—the first of Bloom’s three domains: affective (attitudes), psychomotor (skills) and cognitive (knowledge)—much of the discussion and application ignored and continues to ignore that Bloom et al. looked at the cognitive domain only, to begin with.

Below are two visualised revisions of Bloom’s taxonomy. The figure on the left illustrates a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy in the context of 21st century learning. The figure on the right illustrates the cognitive process dimension of Bloom’s taxonomy: Anderson, Lorin and Krathwohl, David (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing — A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Addison-Wesley Longman.

Henry A. Giroux

Originally published on Truthout | License: CC Attribution-Noncommercial

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: The University in chains: confronting the military-industrial-academic complex (Paradigm, 2007); Against the terror of neoliberalism (Paradigm, 2008); Youth in a suspect society (Palgrave 2009). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.

Paulo Freire and Henry A. Giroux,
in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1981.

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century. Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the Junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice – that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of “taming” students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a “dead zone,” where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district’s ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards. [01] Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

“Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed ‘citizen’ capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values.” [02]

Against this regime of “scientific” idiocy and “bare pedagogy” stripped of all critical elements of teaching and learning, Freire [03] believed that all education in the broadest sense was part of a project of freedom, and eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life and particular notions of critical agency. As Aronowitz puts it in his analysis of Freire’s work on literacy and critical pedagogy:

Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or “careers,” but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, “know thyself,” which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically “critical” pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. [04]

What Paulo made clear in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” his most influential work, is that pedagogy at its best is about neither training, teaching methods nor political indoctrination. For Freire, pedagogy is not a method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, but a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy. Critical thinking for Freire was not an object lesson in test taking, but a tool for self-determination and civic engagement. For Freire, critical thinking was not about the task of simply reproducing the past and understanding the present. On the contrary, it offered a way of thinking beyond the present, soaring beyond the immediate confines of one’s experiences, entering into a critical dialogue with history and imagining a future that did not merely reproduce the present. Theodor Adorno captures the spirit of Freire’s notion of critical thinking by insisting that “Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation…. Open thinking points beyond itself.” [05]

Freire rejected those regimes of educational degradation organized around the demands of the market, instrumentalized knowledge and the priority of training over the pursuit of the imagination, critical thinking and the teaching of freedom and social responsibility. Rather than assume the mantle of a false impartiality, Freire believed that critical pedagogy involves both the recognition that human life is conditioned not determined, and the crucial necessity of not only reading the world critically, but also intervening in the larger social order as part of the responsibility of an informed citizenry. According to Freire, the political and moral demands of pedagogy amount to more than the school and classroom being merely the instrument of official power or assuming the role of an apologist for the existing order, as the Obama administration seems to believe – given its willingness to give Bush’s reactionary educational policies a new name and a new lease on life. Freire rejected those modes of pedagogy that supported economic models and modes of agency in which freedom is reduced to consumerism and economic activity is freed from any criterion except profitability and the reproduction of a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as informed subjects and social agents. In this instance, the issue of how identities, values and desires are shaped in the classroom is the grounds of politics. Critical pedagogy is thus invested in both the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. Moreover, such a pedagogy attempts not only to provide the conditions for students to understand texts and different modes of intelligibility, but also opens up new avenues for them to make better moral judgments that will enable them to assume some sense of responsibility to the other in light of those judgments.

Freire was acutely aware that what makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to ideological fundamentalists, the ruling elites, religious extremists and right-wing nationalists all over the world is that, central to its very definition, is the task of educating students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of public schooling and higher education, if not democracy itself. And as a political and moral practice, way of knowing and literate engagement, pedagogy attempts to “make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history.” [06] History in this sense is engaged as a narrative open to critical dialogue rather than predefined text to be memorized and accepted unquestioningly. Pedagogy in this instance provides the conditions to cultivate in students a healthy skepticism about power, a “willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness.” [07] As a performative practice, pedagogy takes as one of its goals the opportunity for students to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely this relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to so many of our educational leaders and spokespersons today and it is also the reason why Freire’s work on critical pedagogy and literacy are more relevant today than when they were first published.

According to Freire, all forms of pedagogy represent a particular way of understanding society and a specific commitment to the future. Critical pedagogy, unlike dominant modes of teaching, insists that one of the fundamental tasks of educators is to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived. This is hardly a prescription for political indoctrination, but it is a project that gives critical education its most valued purpose and meaning, which, in part, is “to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.” [08] It is also a position, that threatens right-wing private advocacy groups, neoconservative politicians and conservative extremists. Such individuals and groups are keenly aware that critical pedagogy, with its emphasis on the hard work of critical analysis, moral judgments and social responsibility, goes to the very heart of what it means to address real inequalities of power at the social level and to conceive of education as a project for freedom, while at the same time foregrounding a series of important and often ignored questions such as: “What is the role of teachers and academics as public intellectuals? Whose interests does public and higher education serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? What is the role of education as a public good? How do we make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative? In spite of the right-wing view that equates indoctrination with any suggestion of politics, critical pedagogy is not concerned with simply offering students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom; it is also concerned with providing students with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities both to question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social practices that structure every aspect of society and to then take responsibility for intervening in the world they inhabit.

Education is not neutral. It is always directive in its attempt to teach students to inhabit a particular mode of agency; enable them to understand the larger world and one’s role in it in a specific way; define their relationship, if not responsibility, to diverse others and to presuppose through what is taught and experienced in the classroom some sort of understanding of a more just, imaginative, and democratic life. Pedagogy is by definition directive, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination. On the contrary, as Freire argued, education as a practice for freedom must attempt to expand the capacities necessary for human agency and, hence, the possibilities for democracy itself. Surely, this suggests that at all levels of education from the primary school to the privileged precincts of higher education, educators should nourish those pedagogical practices that promote “a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished.” [09] In other words, critical pedagogy forges both an expanded notion of literacy and agency through a language of skepticism, possibility and a culture of openness, debate and engagement – all those elements now at risk because of the current and most dangerous attacks on public and higher education. This was Paulo’s legacy, one that invokes dangerous memories and, hence, is increasingly absent from any discourse about current educational problems.

I first met Paulo in the early 1980s, just after I had been denied tenure by John Silber, then the notorious right-wing president of Boston University. Paulo was giving a talk at the University of Massachusetts, and he came to my house in Boston for dinner. His humility was completely at odds with his reputation and I remember being greeted with such warmth and sincerity that I felt completely at ease with him. We talked for a long time that night about his exile, my firing, what it meant to be a working-class intellectual, the risk one had to take to make a difference, and when the night was over a friendship was forged that lasted until his death 15 years later. I was in a very bad place after being denied tenure and had no idea what my future would hold for me. I am convinced that if it had not been for Freire and Donaldo Macedo, also a friend and co-author with Paulo’s, [10] I am not sure I would have stayed in the field of education. But Freire’s passion for education and Macedo’s friendship convinced me that education was not merely important, but a crucial site of struggle.

Unlike so many intellectuals I have met in academia, Paulo was always so generous, eager to publish the work of younger intellectuals, write letters of support and give as much as possible of himself in the service of others. The early eighties were exciting years in education in the US and Paulo was at the center of it. Together, we started a critical education and culture series at Bergin and Garvey and published over a hundred young authors, many of whom went on to have a significant influence in the university. Jim Bergin became Paulo’s patron as his American publisher, Donaldo became his translator and a co-author and we all took our best shots in translating, publishing and distributing Paulo’s work, always with the hope of inviting him back to the US so we could meet, talk, drink good wine and recharge the struggles that all marked us in different ways. Of course, it is difficult to write simply about Paulo as a person because who he was and how he entered one’s space and the world could never be separated from his politics. Hence, I want to try to provide a broader context for my own understanding of him as well as those ideas that consistently shaped our relationship and his relationship with others.

Occupying the often difficult space between existing politics and the as yet possible, Paulo Freire spent most of his life working in the belief that the radical elements of democracy are worth struggling for, that critical education is a basic element of social change and that how we think about politics is inseparable from how we come to understand the world, power and the moral life we aspire to lead. In many ways, Paulo embodied the important but often problematic relationship between the personal and the political. His own life was a testimonial not only to his belief in democracy, but also to the notion that one’s life had to come as close as possible to modeling the social relations and experiences that spoke to a more humane and democratic future. At the same time, Paulo never moralized about politics, never employed the discourse of shame or collapsed the political into the personal when talking about social issues. For him, private problems had to be understood in relation to larger public issues. Everything about him suggested that the first order of politics was humility, compassion and a willingness to fight against human injustices.

Freire’s belief in democracy as well as his deep and abiding faith in the ability of people to resist the weight of oppressive institutions and ideologies was forged in a spirit of struggle tempered by both the grim realities of his own imprisonment and exile, mediated by both a fierce sense of outrage and the belief that education and hope are the conditions of both agency and politics. Acutely aware that many contemporary versions of hope occupied their own corner in Disneyland, Freire fought against such appropriations and was passionate about recovering and rearticulating hope through, in his words, an “understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism.” [11] Hope for Freire was a practice of witnessing, an act of moral imagination that enabled progressive educators and others to think otherwise in order to act otherwise. Hope demanded an anchoring in transformative practices, and one of the tasks of the progressive educator was to “unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be.” [12] Underlying Freire’s politics of hope was a view of radical pedagogy that located itself on the dividing lines where the relations between domination and oppression, power and powerlessness continued to be produced and reproduced. For Freire, hope as a defining element of politics and pedagogy always meant listening to and working with the poor and other subordinate groups so that they might speak and act in order to alter dominant relations of power. Whenever we talked, he never allowed himself to become cynical. He was always full of life, taking great delight in eating a good meal, listening to music, opening himself up to new experiences and engaging in dialogue with a passion that both embodied his own politics and confirmed the lived presence of others.

Committed to the specific, the play of context and the possibility inherent in what he called the unfinished nature of human beings, Freire offered no recipes for those in need of instant theoretical and political fixes. For him, pedagogy was strategic and performative: considered as part of a broader political practice for democratic change, critical pedagogy was never viewed as an a priori discourse to be reasserted or a methodology to be implemented, or for that matter a slavish attachment to knowledge that can only be quantified. On the contrary, for Freire, pedagogy was a political and performative act organized around the “instructive ambivalence of disrupted borders,” [13] a practice of bafflement, interruption, understanding and intervention that is the result of ongoing historical, social and economic struggles. I was often amazed at how patient he always was in dealing with people who wanted him to provide menu-like answers to the problems they raised about education, not realizing that they were undermining his own insistence that pedagogy could never be reduced to a method. His patience was always instructive for me and I am convinced that it was only later in my life that I was able to begin to emulate it in my own interactions with audiences.

Paulo was a cosmopolitan intellectual, who never overlooked the details in everyday life and the connections the latter had to a much broader, global world. He consistently reminded us that political struggles are won and lost in those specific yet hybridized spaces that linked narratives of everyday experience with the social gravity and material force of institutional power. Any pedagogy that called itself Freirean had to acknowledge the centrality of the particular and contingent in shaping historical contexts and political projects. Although Freire was a theoretician of radical contextualism, he also acknowledged the importance of understanding the particular and the local in relation to larger, global and cross-national forces. For Freire, literacy as a way of reading and changing the world had to be reconceived within a broader understanding of citizenship, democracy and justice that was global and transnational. Making the pedagogical more political in this case meant moving beyond the celebration of tribal mentalities and developing a praxis that foregrounded “power, history, memory, relational analysis, justice (not just representation), and ethics as the issues central to transnational democratic struggles.” [14]

But Freire’s insistence that education was about the making and changing of contexts did more than seize upon the political and pedagogic potentialities to be found across a spectrum of social sites and practices in society, which, of course, included but were not limited to the school. He also challenged the separation of culture from politics by calling attention to how diverse technologies of power work pedagogically within institutions to produce, regulate and legitimate particular forms of knowing, belonging, feeling and desiring. But Freire did not make the mistake of many of his contemporaries by conflating culture with the politics of recognition. Politics was more than a gesture of translation, representation and dialogue, it was also about creating the conditions for people to govern rather than be merely governed, capable of mobilizing social movements against the oppressive economic, racial and sexist practices put into place by colonization, global capitalism, and other oppressive structures of power.

Paulo Freire left behind a corpus of work that emerged out of a lifetime of struggle and commitment. Refusing the comfort of master narratives, Freire work was always unsettled and unsettling, restless yet engaging. Unlike so much of the politically arid and morally vacuous academic and public prose that characterizes contemporary intellectual discourse, Freire’s work was consistently fueled by a healthy moral rage over the needless oppression and suffering he witnessed throughout his life as he traveled all over the globe. Similarly, his work exhibited a vibrant and dynamic quality that allowed it to grow, refuse easy formulas and open itself to new political realities and projects. Freire’s genius was to elaborate a theory of social change and engagement that was neither vanguardist nor populist. While he had a profound faith in the ability of ordinary people to shape history and to become critical agents in shaping their own destinies, he refused to romanticize the culture and experiences that produced oppressive social conditions. Combining theoretical rigor, social relevance and moral compassion, Freire gave new meaning to the politics of daily life while affirming the importance of theory in opening up the space of critique, possibility, politics and practice. Theory and language were a site of struggle and possibility that gave experience meaning and action a political direction, and any attempt to reproduce the binarism of theory vs. politics was repeatedly condemned by Freire. [15] Freire loved theory, but he never reified it. When he talked about Freud, Marx or Erich Fromm, one could feel his intense passion for ideas. And, yet, he never treated theory as an end in itself; it was always a resource, the value of which lay in understanding, critically engaging and transforming the world as part of a larger project of freedom and justice. To say that his joy around such matters was infectious is to understate his own presence and impact on so many people that he met in his life.

I had a close personal relationship with Paulo for over 15 years, and I was always moved by the way in which his political courage and intellectual reach were matched by a love of life and generosity of spirit. The political and the personal mutually informed Freire’s life and work. He was always the curious student even as he assumed the role of a critical teacher. As he moved between the private and the public, he revealed an astonishing gift for making everyone he met feel valued. His very presence embodied what it meant to combine political struggle and moral courage, to make hope meaningful and despair unpersuasive. Paulo was vigilant in bearing witness to the individual and collective suffering of others, but shunned the role of the isolated intellectual as an existential hero who struggles alone. For Freire, intellectuals must match their call for making the pedagogical more political with an ongoing effort to build those coalitions, affiliations and social movements capable of mobilizing real power and promoting substantive social change. Freire understood quite keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial complex and the increased power of the warfare state, but he also recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond the common sense of official power and its legitimating ideologies. Freire never lost sight of Robert Hass’ claim that the job of education, its political job, “is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time.” [16]

At a time when education has become one of the official sites of conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, the legacy of Paulo Freire’s work is more important than ever before.

_________
01. On the issue of containment and the pedagogy of punishment, see: Jenny Fisher, “The Walking Wounded: The Crisis of Youth, School Violence, and Precarious Pedagogy, Review of Education, Cultural Studies, and Pedagogy” (in press). ↑
02. Stanley Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters,” (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. xii. ↑
03. One of the best sources on the life and work of Paulo Freire is Peter Mayo, “Liberating Praxis: Freire’s Legacy for Radical Education and Politics” (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008). Two of the best translators of Freire’s work to the American context are Donaldo Macedo, “Literacies of Power” (Boulder: Westview, 1994) and Ira Shor, “Freire for the Classroom” (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1987). ↑
04. Stanley Aronowitz, “Forward,” “Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities,” ed. Sheila L. Macrine, (New York, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) pp. ix. ↑
05. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 291-292. ↑
06. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 141. ↑
07. Ibid, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 501. ↑
08. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in “Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom” (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 10 – 11. ↑
09. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, “Conversations With Zygmunt Bauman” (Malden: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4. ↑
10. See Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, “Literacy: Reading the Word and the World” (Amherst, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987). ↑
11. Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of Hope” (New York: Continuum Press, 1994), p. 91. ↑
12. Ibid., p. 9. ↑
13. Cited in Homi Bhabha, “The Enchantment of Art,” Carol Becker and Ann Wiens, eds. “The Artist in Society” (Chicago: New Art Examiner, 1994), p. 28. ↑
14. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements,” J. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, eds. “Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures” (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. xix. ↑
15. Surely, Freire would have agreed wholeheartedly with Stuart Hall’s insight that: “It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation.” Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Popular Culture?” in Gina Dent, ed. “Black Popular Culture” (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), pp. 30. ↑
16. Robert Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, “Robert Hass,” Mother Jones (March/April, 1992), p. 22. ↑

Writing for (y)EU – Full edit from Web Com on Vimeo.

We (actually, our boss, Steve) could not resist to upload this video. We made it for a Christmas Party and we intend to edit it in shorter versions to promote our team’s blog. But, come on, we (aka the boss) find it so great ;-)

A concerted collective effort is currently underway to define non-formal education and non-formal learning.

It is exciting and informative, but at times, it almost seems like a catch-22…

Defining the meaning of words is essential to begin to understand the different contexts and connotations. Definitions, though, must be universal: they must apply to all aspects and meanings of the definiendum…

Definitions in European—let alone global—contexts can, therefore, not be normative (in the philosophical meaning of the word), but can only attempt to be descriptive and explanatory – while avoiding ambiguity through getting lost in details.

If definitions are understood as explanatory statements that capture the meaning, the use, the function and the essence of a term or a concept – how can definitions of non-formal education and learning be produced that hold true for so many heterogeneous contexts?

Defining NFE – Catch-22?
Photo by buriednexttoyou

One way or the other, it seems necessary and adequate to not cling to any of the established classes of definitions – such as, say, stipulative, or ostensive.

Most of the elements of definitions for non-formal education and non-formal learning variedly include several elements: some are more reportive (i.e. attempting to capture the essence of a concept as in use today), others are more stipulative (i.e. give a term a new or expanding meaning in a European or global context), and most are a combination of these two.

I am quite curious what definitions will be constructed from this collective undertaking of TALE and TOT and NONFORMALITY.

Join the fray if you like!

Right.

Instruments are designed at high speed – from self-assessment forms to personal development plans, from self-perception inventories to competence improvement maps – resulting in a cacophony of abbreviations that seems only a little shy of setting new records.

A rigorous evaluation of these instruments – looking at aims, scopes and approaches as well as usage, usefulness and impact – is as much missing as a painstaking analysis of underlying frameworks and tacit assumptions.

It is clear already, however, that the entire assortment of self-assessment instruments fails to respond to some key questions, among them:

• In the absence of quality standards, what do you measure yourself against?
• In the absence of external expertise for validation, how exactly should recognition and accreditation come about?

Even when leaving all political intentions and inconspicuous ambitions in relation to validation, recognition and accreditation aside, I have trouble finding value in any of these instruments for their most palpable purpose – self-assessment.

Take whichever you want – SAF, SPI, CIM, PDP – they all start from yourself as a trainer and educator. Not yourself as a trainer and educator in a particular project or context, but rather yourself as a trainer and educator in life. Through this inherent claim of being universally relevant and the resulting decontextualisation, the self-assessment process loses most of its value for me.

Let me pick three quandaries to exemplify and justify my defiance:

Firstly, this approach implies that there is a potentially agreeable set of competences for non-formal educators. It assumes that there is a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes that, once mastered, makes for a non-formal educator of tolerable, decent or outstanding quality.

Secondly, this approach implies that there is a universally acceptable scale along which any set of competences could and should be measured. It assumes that there is a common understanding of what it means to be moderately or exceptionally competent or incompetent in a specific area.

Thirdly, this approach implies that educators are generally aware of what specific competences entail before they have fully mastered them. It assumes that there is sufficient understanding of knowledge, skills and attitudes required to achieve basic or advanced levels of proficiency.

Research can prove what common sense and practical experience tell us: none of this is true, none of these assumptions hold, they crumble at first sight. And yet we continue to invent and re-invent self-assessment tools, defeated before we start by their envisaged universality…

How then, you ask, could a useful self-assessment instrument look like?

A very good question indeed :)

I will gladly take on the challenge to develop some ideas for alternative tools in the second part of this mini-series, but let’s first leave some time for your questions and ideas, your criticism and feedback. Fire away!

Much has been written about the Copen­hagen Climate Summit, as the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference—inc­luding the 15th Conference of the Parties [COP15] to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] and the 5th Meeting of the Parties [MOP5] to the Kyoto Protocol—has come to be called.

Hundreds of millions of US Dollars were spent on this chaotic, disastrous nightmare of a frantic summit. That is a hell of a lot of money to burn for bickering and filibustering to finally take note of the “Copenhagen Accord“, which no spin-doctoring can mispresent as anything use- or meaningful.

But it’s not the failed negotiations that upset me most.

It is two other aspects – it is how we were ridiculed by power twice.

The ugly face of power | Photo by thousand.wor(l)ds

Firstly, I am upset about the unashamed and disgusting display and abuse of state power. More than 122 million US Dollars—$122.000.000,00—were spent to secure Copenhagen, and none of it was pretty.

The tip of the iceberg: protests were undermined by deployed undercover officers, phones of activists were tapped, meetings were infiltrated…

Protesters were kettled and arrested in vast numbers—thousands—to be wagoned off to steel cages in a former beer warehouse especially constructed for the climate conference apparently called “Guantánamo Junior”. It’s difficult to see how this could not be called mass repression.

While there is hope that most of this shit will turn out to have been violating the European Convention of Human Rights, we would be lying to ourselves if we continued to praise existing channels of participation as meaningful if even our most basic democratic and human rights are violated so shamelessly.

Secondly, I am upset by the idiocy of the civil society movement. Most NGOs were quick to blaim Obama and claim that the US had wrecked the climate negotiations by demanding too much while offering too little, a sentiment speedily reproduced in the media. But as Mark Lynas—a British author, journalist and environmental activist—points out, many developing countries have much more to lose by legally binding agreements because it would impact their coal-driven growth more directly and more quickly.

Lynas, who was advising the Maldives delegation during the summit, argues in his eyewitness account of the final negotiations behind closed doors that “China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Mark observes that

“the NGO movement is ten years out of date. They’re still arguing for ‘climate justice’, whatever that means, which is interpreted by the big developing countries like India and China as a right to pollute up to Western levels. To me carbon equity is the logic of mutually assured destruction. I think NGOs are far too soft on the Chinese, given that it’s the world’s biggest polluter, and is the single most important factor in deciding when global emissions will peak, which in turn is the single most important factor in the eventual temperature outcome. Too many leftist activists are therefore tending to side with the big polluters because they think they’re standing in solidarity with the world’s poor.”

Meanwhile India has confirmed that it co-operated with China and other nations to torpedo any legally binding targets at the talks – and while I love the new video of the global youth climate movement, I would much rather hear a well argued response and, more importantly, see a shift in logic and argumentation that leaves antiquated sentiments behind.

Act the fuck now! | Photo by thousand.wor(l)ds

Their upcoming Conference “Vision not Division – Learning for all in the 21st Century,” jointly organised amongst others with Futurelab – Innovation in Education, focuses on

“the increasingly significant contribution that non-formal learning is likely to have to play in the future provision of education and learning in the 21st Century.”

The conference brings together seminal figures from the British sphere of non-formal learning – researchers, practitioners and policy makers alike.

In preparation and anticipation of the conference, their consultation planning group looked at recent definitions of non-formal learning to identify some common ground through characteristics of non-formal learning spanning across several definitions:

• a commitment to the ‘agency of the learner’
• purposeful and intentional learning but most often a voluntary commitment by the learner
• reliant on a set of values/beliefs about learning rather than an organizational setting
• learner-centred
• requiring a flexibility in learning styles, tending towards experiential and reflective
• provides for accreditation of learning if required by the learner
• takes place in a wide range of environments and settings covering a broad range of subjects and activities
• delivers an integral aspect of Life Long Learning

They also say that, in their view,

“non-formal learning occupies the space that separates formal and informal learning and permeates both these arenas, when utilised by skilled and expert practitioners.” [Source]

The definitions considered are well-known and widely referred to – including the European Commission’s Communication “Making a European Area of Lifeling Learning a Reality (2001),” the shared Commission & Council Working Paper “Pathways towards validation and recognition of education, training & learning in the youth field (2004)” and the Salto Report “Promoting recognition of youth work across Europe (2005).”

(Sidenote of interest: the people behind the definitions in these reports are no other than Lynne Chisholm and Peter Lauritzen. Andreas)

What do you think about this common ground?

Something missing, something wrong?

The Manifesto is one of the key outcomes of the European Year and comes with the ambition to shape the European Union’s strategy for promoting creativity and innovation during the next decade. At the handing over ceremony, Commission President Barroso reconfirmed that the Manifesto will inform and feed into the coming EU2020 strategy.

At the time of writing, the Manifesto was available as a pdf-document only, so we wanted to make it fully available online – also out of curiosity what reactions you might have to the ideas outlined in the document.

Some of the guiding questions, as phrased by the European Commisson, were:

How can Europe be at the forefront of the new, globalised, intensely competitive and knowl­edge-based world of the 21st century? How can the creative and innovative potential of Europe be better used in education, research, culture, design, business and the work­place? How can public policy at the European and national levels foster creativity and inno­vation in these fields?

Update: A little bit of additional context: “The manifesto is largely the product of six debates in Brussels this year on key topics surrounding creativity and innovation.” (Source)

Below is the entire Manifesto preceded by an overview of the 27 ambassadors, a group of “leading European personalities from the fields of culture, science, business, education and design” – hover over the image to see who is who, or click on the image to read the profiles at the website of the European Year.

European Ambassadors for Creativity and Innovation

Manifesto for Creativity and Innovation [pdf]

The world is moving to a new rhythm. To be at the forefront of this new world, Europe needs to become more creative and innovative. To be creative means to imagine something that didn’t exist before and to look for new solutions and forms. To be innovative means to introduce change in society and in the economy. Design activities transform ideas into value and link creativity to innovation.

In order to progress, Europe needs increased investment – both private and public – in knowledge. Moving ahead with wisdom requires respect for history and the cultural heritage. New knowledge builds upon historical knowledge, and most innovations are new combinations of what is already there. Culture, with its respect for individual and collective memory, is important to maintaining a sense of direction in the current context of restless change.

Creativity is a fundamental dimension of human activity. It thrives where there is dialogue between cultures, in a free, open and diverse environment with social and gender equality. It requires respect and legal protection for the outcomes of creative and intellectual work. Creativity is at the heart of culture, design and innovation, but everyone has the right to utilise their creative talent. More than ever, Europe’s future depends on the imagination and creativity of its people.

The economic, environmental and social crises challenge us to find new ways of thinking and acting. Creativity and innovation can move society forward toward prosperity, but society needs to take responsibility for how they are used. Today, they must be mobilised in favour of a fair and green society, based upon intercultural dialogue and with respect for nature and for the health and well-being of people worldwide.

To create a more creative and innovative Europe, open to the rest of the world and respectful of human values, we present the following manifesto, which sets out our priorities and our recommendations for action. The need for change and a new initiative is urgent. Europe and its Member States must give full attention to creativity and innovation now in order to find a way out of the current stalemate.

Manifesto

1. Nurture creativity in a lifelong learning process where theory and practice go hand in hand.
2. Make schools and universities places where students and teachers engage in creative thinking and learning by doing.
3. Transform workplaces into learning sites.
4. Promote a strong, independent and diverse cultural sector that can sustain intercultural dialogue.
5. Promote scientific research to understand the world, improve people’s lives and stimulate innovation.
6. Promote design processes, thinking and tools, understanding the needs, emotions, aspirations and abilities of users.
7. Support business innovation that contributes to prosperity and sustainability.

Lines of action

The following lines of action require a new understanding of public policy. The European Commission and national Governments need to engage in change together with social partners and grass-root movements. Shared visions and initiatives that cross traditional policy areas are needed in order to deal with current ecological, social, cultural, security and democratic deficits. Focusing upon creativity and innovation is a key to opening dialogues that cross historical political divides.

Action 1: Invest in knowledge
In order to strengthen the competitiveness of Europe, new budgetary principles that give high priority to investments in people and knowledge are necessary. In the short term, unemployed workers should be offered a chance to upgrade their skills. Business, trade unions and governments should work together in organising the upgrading of workers’ skills through public and private funding. The scale and ambition of the European Structural Funds must be expanded, be focused upon investment in research and knowledge and linked to building institutional frameworks that support learning in working life.

Action 2: Reinvent education
Schools and universities need to be reinvented in partnership with teachers and students so that education prepares people for the learning society. Retrain teachers and engage parents so that they can contribute to an education system that develops the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes for intercultural dialogue, critical thinking, problem-solving and creative projects. Give a strong emphasis to design in education at different levels. Establish a major European-wide research and development effort on education to improve quality and creativity at all levels.

Action 3: Reward initiative
People that take new initiatives in business, the public sector and civic society should be rewarded. Social policies can contribute to innovation by sharing risks with citizens who engage in change. Artists, designers, scientists and entrepreneurs who contribute with new ideas should be rewarded. Prizes for excellence should be combined with legal protection of intellectual property rights and strike a balance between creating fair rewards and promoting knowledge-sharing.

Action 4: Sustain culture
Capacity-building in the cultural sector should be supported through national and European programmes and mechanisms in order to sustain cultural diversity, independence and intercultural dialogue. Creative industries should be promoted by building new bridges between art, philosophy, science and business. The development and use of new media should be stimulated through raising the quality of the content. New economic models must be developed to finance free, diverse, independent and high-quality digital news media.

Action 5: Promote innovation
There is a need for a more ambitious and broad-based innovation policy. Increased investment in science, technology and design should be combined with efforts to increase the demand for knowledge. Firms should be stimulated to combine scientific knowledge with experience-based knowledge. They should be encouraged to increase diversity among employees in terms of gender, education and nationality. The education of engineers, managers and designers should mix theoretical education with practical experience. Innovation policy as well as labour market and education policy should aim at mobilising users and employees in processes of change. Developing and implementing broad innovation policy strategies must be a major concern for political leaders.

Action 6: Think globally
Europe should be at the world-wide forefront in terms of science, culture and competitiveness. Collaboration within Europe in science, technology, education, design and culture needs to be further opened up to the rest of the world. A competitive Europe should develop economic collaboration both with the strong new emerging economies and with the poor countries most in need of support. Promoting innovation in poor countries is a moral obligation and it reduces the pressure of immigration. Europe should contribute to the establishment of fair rules regarding the protection and sharing of knowledge at the global level.

Action 7: Green the economy
Europe must mobilise creativity and innovation to transform itself into a post-carbon society. A key element is eco-innovation and the establishment of a ‘new techno- economic trajectory’ starting from ‘end of pipe’ solutions, moving through ‘clean technologies’ and ending with ‘system innovations’ that radically transform production, distribution and consumption. Investments need to be combined with new institutions, new regulation and new habits. Creativity is the major tool to find solutions that combine sustainability with prosperity.

Yet, allow me to whisper in this tiny little corner of the world wide web: before embracing our new, shiny, buzzy concept it might be wortwhile to consider—at least—three fundamental dilemmas.

The first dilemma gravitates around conceptual confusion.

There is, quite simply, no agreement on the meaning of learning to learn. The Union attempts to elegantly ignore that little glitch by descri­bing learning to learn as “the ability to organise, pursue and persist in one’s own learning.” [01]

But no matter how much policy-makers would like to (make us) believe that there is a universal understanding of learning to learn – there simply isn’t. Definitions and descriptions differ funda­mentally and significantly across research, policy and practice and include

• the ability and willingness to adapt to novel tasks [02]
• a complex mix of knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and dispositions [03]
• a collection of good learning practices [04]
• a developmental, fluid and multidimensional lifelong process [05]
• a mixture of acquiring competences and developing qualities [06]

How these different approaches relate to or complement each other, remains confused and confus­ing. (And, unfortunately, it doesn’t help much that not even two scientists—or practitioners, for that matter—could agree on what the underlying notion of learning should really mean or be.)

The second dilemma gravitates around political confusion.

Our generation is possibly the first—and definitely not the last—to experience the limits of the antiquated learn first–work later logic that has now been officially stamped as obsolete by the EU.

Learning – the solution for everything?

On a silver platter, we have been presented with the solution to our problems: “Learn more and longer and better, yes: learn lifelong and lifewide,” the Union roars, “and you will surely be well prepared for the fast-changing world and the insecurities of the future, including the high risk of unemployment [07]!”

It is sadly typical for our times of individualisation—and trust me, this is far less cynical than it seems at first sight—that the European Union believes it can get away with attempting to pomp­ously drop the responsibility for lifelong learning in the lap of each and every individual citizen.

Thanks, but no thanks. We may agree that formal education no longer fulfils its prescribed function of providing knowledge sufficient to last a life-time, but nobody has to fully comprehend Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas around liquid modernity and the privatisation of risk and ambivalence [08] to under­stand that this responsibility-shift is a dungbomb.

The third dilemma gravitates around philosophical confusion.

The Knowledge Society is about sharing!
Photo by Ben Foertsch | youthphotos.eu

While literacy and knowledge have both spread immensely in the past centuries, in particular due to the impact of Gutenberg’s seminal invention of the printing press, industrialisation has also led to a narrowing understanding of learning as an instrument to equip (young) people with the knowledge deemed necessary for a successful work life – an idea now widely acknowledged to be failing.

And so, the Union would like to limit knowledge societies to a world in which lifelong learning merely guarantees “more flexibility in the labour force, allowing it to adapt more quickly to constant changes in an increasingly interconnected world.” [09] Quite consequently, learning continues to be treated as a functional process, not more than a commodity.

In a knowledge society that understands itself as “a space to co-create, share and use knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of all its people” [10], however, lifelong learning is a deeply collective and mutually rewarding process not merely at the service of gathering yet more knowledge to remain a flexibly adaptive particle of the industrial—or academic—workforce.

So, why is it that a conceptually, politically and philosophically confused, confusing and contested approach as learning to learn has earned itself such noncritical prominence in educational research, practice and politics alike?

Shouldn’t policy-makers who pride themselves in being critical do more than quickly turn away, muttering half-hearted praise about the Union’s educational policies just because everyone else seems to be doing so?

Shouldn’t researchers who claim to engage in dialogue do more than turn a blind eye when politics shamelessly abuses the empty space left void by academics arguing about definitions of learning to learn?

Shoudn’t practitioners who claim to empower (young) people do more than embrace dubious concepts—in the hope that they will find the space to be critical from within—just because there is project funding to be had?

Time to dance? | Photo by Pedro Simoes

Shouldn’t we all, much rather, be honest and admit that such limited understandings insult much of what we know and believe about learning – our intellect as much as our intuition?

Shouldn’t we all, much rather, laugh at and dance around such shortsighted concepts and—in one happy triangle—empower (young) people to think, to think critically, to question, to discover when their thinking is about to be abused, to think freely and act for change? [11]

Time to re-think
learning to learn…
Don’t you think?

_________
01. Education and Culture DG (2007) Key Competences for Lifelong Learning – A European Framework. Luxembourg: European Communities. ↑
02. Hautamäki, Jarkko (2002) Assessing learning to learn: a framework. Helsinki: National Board of Education. ↑
03. Hoskins, Bryony and Crick, Ruth (2008) Learning to learn and civic competences: different currencies or two sides of the same coin? Ispra: CRELL. ↑
04. James, Mary et al (2007) Improving learning how to learn. London: Routledge. ↑
05. Candy, Philip (1990) How people learn to learn. In Smith, Robert (ed) Learning to learn across the life span. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ↑
06. Chisholm, Lynne (2006) On defining learning to learn. Ispra: CRELL. ↑
07. On October 30, 2009, Eurostat has reported the youth unemployment rate at 20.2% in the European Union, up from 15.8% in September 2008. ↑
08. Bauman, Zygmunt (2006) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. ↑
09. No, I am not making this up – I don’t have to: it’s as surreal as it gets. ↑
10. Source: Glossary of Key Terms | Digital Strategy Government New Zealand ↑
11. Thought so. ↑

What a controversial quote!

Photo by Lisa Marie Knitter | www.youthphotos.eu

And definitely a statement to trigger very interesting discussions at trainings. Bringing in controversial cases—with themes ranging from violence against women, exploitation of welfare systems, or explaining terrorism or school performance with Islamic culture—and controversial statements such as the one of Nasim Karim often leads to heated discussions, to great frustration with getting the terms right, and eventually to relief—both from participants with majority and minority background—when, at the end, a consensus is reached about what should be named culture and what should definitely not be named culture.

The title of this article might be rather provoking for some, as we have been raised to think that cultural awareness is the way to create tolerance. But we fail when confronted with the above examples:

If violence against women is a cultural expression, should we then accept and respect it? And if doing so, wouldn’t we be feeding the extreme right with arguments against multicultural societies? And if we should not respect it, does it then mean that certain cultures are bad, primitive, and cannot be integrated?

Of course not! But there is no doubt that youth workers and trainers are confronted with such dilemmas. Let’s look at a concrete example: During trainings on multicultural teamwork, we use Forum Theatre [3] to explore conflicts that might arise in multicultural settings. The participants, using cases from their daily youth and social work, put escalations of conflicts on stage, eventually asking the spectators to intervene.

A Forum Theatre Scene | Photo by Nuno da Silva

One group once put a young guy with ethnic minority background—played by a participant with ethnic minority background—as the oppressor of a female teacher and the school director, whom he accused of racism. The play started and the guy, who called himself Mohammed, entered the fictive computer-room, where his two friends were receiving classes from the female teacher. Mohammed and his friends were joking and ignoring the woman, and the teacher got upset about the disturbance of her class. Mohammed was therefore invited to a talk with the director, and this very fast escalated into open conflict, where Mohammed accused everyone of being racist. The play created lots of discussion on two-sided oppression and different tools for communicating and interacting with each other in respectful ways.

At first, we were rather surprised as a more “political correct” way of showing the scene would have been to put the teacher and the school director as oppressors of the ethnic minority guys. However, the play was touching upon exactly this dilemma: What to do when somebody explains or excuses negative behaviour with culture? Should we respect and accept their behaviour? Should we conclude that the culture is violent or bad?

My answer is another question: Do these happenings have anything to do with the thing called culture? The cause of the dilemma is to our belief that culture is not a concrete thing, but rather a concept that is used in many different ways. One example is the way that the extreme right in European societies has taken over the concept of culture: they are aware of and respect cultural differences – as long as they are practiced somewhere else! Change the notion of culture with race in the sentence – and feel the shivering! Another example is persons with ethnic minority background justifying violence against women by drawing on their culture.

Of course the way that the extreme right and some ethnic minorities use the concept of culture is very different from the way that it is used within youth work, anti-racism work etc (or is it?). But that is exactly the point: “Culture” is used to cover everything – and thus nothing. Basically the concept of culture is used by almost everyone to argue for their own point of view: being it the extreme right to explain the conflicts in current European societies (including terrorism) and to justify heavy discrimination, or some ethnic minorities themselves to justify what could otherwise be seen as transgressions towards e.g. women or homosexuals.

Everyone seems to be “aware of cultural differences” (even extremists on both sides) – and it quickly gets very difficult to see how more of such awareness—as is the goal of much intercultural learning—can actually contribute as a frame for the encounter between majority and minority and foster mutual respect and understanding.

We are, as the recognised (though controversial) Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan (2002) observes, turning culture into a new concept of race, as it becomes a term for the exotic, which we mainly apply to “them”, but not to ourselves.

Where majority youth is seen as having agency, will and opinion of their own, minority youth is often seen as “products of their culture” – defined by the nation where their parents or grandparents once lived. Minority youth committing a crime must therefore be caused by their culture – whereas it is caused by mental or social problems when a majority youngster does something similar. We thus mainly explain “the other’s” negative behaviour with culture, but don’t apply the term when they behave just like “us”.

What we observe is that the discourse of culture is becoming a new “discourse of exclusion”, where most people agree that we should appreciate and respect cultural differences, though at the same time use these cultural differences to explain high delinquency rates among minority youth, exploitation of the social welfare system, failure on the labour market, and even terrorism etc.

Just reading the newspaper on any other day, you will most probably encounter an article exemplifying this. What is lost is thus the critical social analysis of what defines these young people’s realities – apart from culture – namely (a lack of) access to education, and work, and spaces where decisions are taken, and much more. The concept of culture can thus be said to disempower us by hiding the real causes of behaviour and leaving us with no tools for meaningful integration.

What we need is not more awareness of cultural differences, but to beware of the way “culture” can be misused to argue for the wrong things. We furthermore need an alternative explanation of societal problems, and alternative means to deal with the challenges in order to truly include everyone.

This is the fourth published article of our critical series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from In Dialogue. [4] Start with The Derdians if you have missed the beginning.

_________
1. Nasim Karim, a Norwegian of Pakistani descent, was able to escape Pakistan after being forcibly married there. She was almost beaten to death because she tried to refuse the marriage. “She managed, against all odds,” Unni Wikan writes, “to make her way to the Norwegian embassy in Islamabad and, with the embassy’s help, to flee the country.” She had to go to court to have her marriage annulled. ↑
2. Wikan, Unni (2001) Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. University of Chicago Press. ↑
3. Forum Theatre is a drama method developed by Augusto Boal to explore oppression and empower people to take steps towards this oppression. ↑
4. It was originally written in 2006, and has lost none of its potency. ↑

This is the first published article of a series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from The Sparkle.

How many of you have ever heard about the country called Derdia? If you haven’t, just take a quick look at the training kit on intercultural learning, where the simulation game “The Derdians” is described here.

In “The Derdians” half of the group has to act as engineers, having to teach the other half – people from Derdia – how to build a bridge with paper, scotch and scissors.

Both the engineers and the Derdians get clear role-descriptions: The engineers are told by which criteria the bridge should be built, and that they should not build it themselves, but teach the Derdians so that they will be able to build bridges in the future. The Derdians on the other hand are instructed in their “cultural behaviour” – e.g. that they touch each other a lot, that they only accept a particular kind of greeting: a kiss on one shoulder, and thus get offended if somebody tries to shake their hand, that they always say yes, even when they mean no, and that they have a particular tradition and religion which prescribes which tools men and women respectively are allowed to touch.

And how does this game look in action? Great fun! Everybody is having a great time. If you use this game as a trainer you will most likely hear laughter and see a group of participants deeply engaged in solving the task – and you will afterwards hear positive feedback: “What an interesting game – the highlight of the course!” Satisfied as a trainer? I am definitely not! Let’s take a closer look at intercultural learning as represented by the engineers meeting the Derdians.

The T-kit proposes that the trainer debriefs the game, writing up facts, feelings and interpretations and discusses to which degree we assume that other people think like we do, and interpret other people’s actions accordingly, and how cultural background influences the role you play. This will for sure lead to an interesting discussion about cultural difference, which we should respect and value. But something still seems to be missing.

Not so long ago I made a group play this game with the above mentioned results: “fun”, “interesting” etc. However, we departed from the above described debriefing and asked the group to describe the two different cultures. Not surprisingly the Derdians were characterised by touching, kissing on shoulders, hugging, sexual segregation, friendly, not liking work so much – behaving according to their culture. The engineers on the other hand were task-oriented, knowledgeable about bridges, delegated the work, able to teach and willing to try to understand others.

Through the discussion following the exercise it became clear for everyone that the “culture” of the engineers is more or less not-existing, according to the simulation game – they have science and knowledge, which they can use to teach the other group something about building the bridges. The Derdians on the other hand do have a “culture”, with such characteristics as kissing on shoulders, hugging, clear gender division etc., which actually complicates the mission of the engineers – namely to bring them knowledge and development. When the group was asked to place the two cultures geographically, there was large agreement: The engineers live up north and the Derdians to the south and east. Disagreement occurred however, when it had to be decided how far south – the northern-Europeans thought that Southern Europe was far enough, whereas the southern Europeans thought we had to go further south – somewhere in Africa. Through this discussion it becomes clear, that the simulation game says more about how Europeans look at other parts of the world/other cultures (sometimes how the majority looks at the minority), rather than actually showing cultural differences.

So back to the start: What is intercultural learning? An interesting discussion of this subject has been started by Gavan Titley’s paper on intercultural learning in DYS COE-activities (also found on this site here).

One of the conclusions is that culture is not a thing, we can characterise, define and almost touch – culture is a concept, which can be defined in indefinite ways. So which one do we choose? “The Derdians” seems to be clear on that point. As far as I can see the simulation game takes a concept of culture on board, which was prevalent in the 1950s-1970s, and which is heavily outdated.

Let me explain: Previously progress was viewed as a development from tradition to modernity. Culture was seen as a characteristic of “traditional societies”, whereas modern societies had “overcome their traditional/cultural beliefs” and were instead ruled by science, rationality and knowledge.

Culture was in this way a kind of “resistance to modernisation, which had to be overcome” (Titley, 2005, p. 12) – just like the engineers have to overcome the kissing and hugging of the Derdians to be able to build bridges. Of course this view of culture is based on a Euro-centric point of view – where the modern are “us” and the traditional are “the others”, who compared to “us” seem to lack something – our rationality and science.

But isn’t this ethnocentrism exactly what we were supposed to fight by intercultural learning?

Time has moved on, our understanding of culture has developed towards greater complexity, and my argument is that we need to base intercultural learning on another concept of culture if we truly want to fight intolerance, prejudices and discrimination. Taking a recognised game like “The Derdians” (but also other games like Albatros and Rafa Rafa) and using it in an unreflected way is very dangerous. Rather than tolerance I am afraid that the game reproduces stereotypes and arrogance of certain population groups or countries towards others. It reduces differences between groups or countries to culture, rather than bringing up a discussion of educational systems in the respective countries, of economic injustices etc.

This point will be discussed further in a series of articles on ICL on this website, which will try to exemplify (and show alternatives) to the critique that Gavan Titley has raised on current ICL practices. So make sure to visit this site again!

Post scriptum: At the above mentioned training the trainers recommended the participants to skip this game and find other means of stimulating intercultural learning. An important question is whether the trainers committed the same crime as they warned about by showing the “wrong example” to reach these points rather than its alternative. This question became very urgent, as many participants kept mentioning the game as a highlight, because it had been so much fun!

Summary of related links:
Training Kit 4 ‘Intercultural Learning’
The Derdians – Excerpt T-Kit 4
ICL is not enough
The Sparkle

Contact Lene by e-mail or share your thoughts with everyone and leave a comment below!

» Is intercultural learning still useful today?

(Originally posted on November 29, 2007 – updated on July 3, 2009)

10 years ago, the «Ten Theses on the correlation between European youth encounters, intercultural learning and demands on full and part-time staff in these encounters» were published by Dr. Hendrik Otten of the «Institute for Applied Communication Research – IKAB».

Since 1997, these ten theses (pdf) have informed the discourse about intercultural learning in youth work.

At the occasion of the 2007 seminar of the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sport entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Dr. Hendrik Otten was invited to revisit, de-construct and re-construct the ten theses. And we recorded his intervention as a podcast for the world out there!

Download the podcast below to find out why intercultural learning has failed as a concept to balance cultures, why we will have to accept more unsatisfactory compromises while constructing a shared system of justice, why the ability for intercultural discourse has to be connected with a developed understanding of human rights, how intercultural learning can be used to help people live with dilemmas and ambiguity – and whether intercultural learning has a role and chance in addressing our inner-societal wars.

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 13 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.

It all started with the succint observation that

» tolerance is so yesterday

by Bastian at half past five in the damn early morning, after what apparantly was a night of working on an application for the lovely & beloved June 1 deadline. An hour and a half later Snezana signals agreement:

» tolerance is passé!

Another thirty minutes later Darek asks with lapidarity equivalent to, I guess and digress, electronically raised eyebrows:

» Is it? Why?

Whoosh! And off took the debate…

Photo by ~C4Chaos on flickr

Before you re-live the discussion and chip in with your own two cents, let me throw in some definitions of the English words that we discuss.

I am fully aware that, on the one hand, these definitions can be disagreed with; and they should not resolve the matter or stifle the debate. But, on the other hand, our discourse often originates from—and gets stuck in—the different meanings of words in our respective mother tongues as well as different socio-political spaces.

tol‧er‧ance

     the ability, willingness, or capacity to tolerate something.
     Origin: from Latin, tolerare (see tolerate).

tol‧er‧ate

     1. allow the existence or occurence of (something that one dislikes
         or disagrees with) without interference.
     2. endure (somone or something unpleasant) with forbearance.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition 2008.

To me, the problem seems at least partly caused by the attempt of the United Nations to instil a philosophical meaning into the word tolerance that it doesn’t seem to carry linguistically.

Take the Declaration on the Principles of Tolerance by UNESCO, which offers a philosophical definition of tolerance like so:

“Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance is harmony in difference.”

Wikipedia, to refer at least once to everybody’s favourite dictionary of our times, describes tolerant as moderately respectful – and that is, as the Oxford Dictionary definitions from above, pretty different from the UN, I would say…

So, here comes the debate (as of June 2, 2009 at 17:00 hrs) — read it from the bottom up, as the most recent entries are on top [UPDATE: It seems that Twitter is not really able to sort conversations chronologically—please don't ask why—but you'll probably get the picture despite the confusing order...]!

What do you say?

Because there is, regrettably, no open discourse on the situation of the Youth Forum between the different movements and strands—with most youth organisations, in united hypocrisy, happily ignoring their own call to politics for more transparency—these voices cannot be easily heard, but the increasing frequency, intensity and attractiveness of networks and meetings working on the establishment of organisational alternatives will soon lead to visible results, which will exemplify for how long the dissatisfaction with the Youth Forum has simmered.

The few large organisations that currently dominate the platform—most notably the scouts and the socialists—share a lack of interest to make the European Youth Forum a strong voice of young people with key institutional players such as the European Commission: both sides fear the loss of power and influence.

Luckily for these players, the Youth Forum is, in its current state, caught in internal power struggles and ensnared by a lack of critical voices: seemingly endless discussions culminate in carefully negotiated position papers that lack both courage and authenticity.

Having discovered Youtube, the European Youth Forum publicly demonstrates—for anyone who has the strength to sit through their video speeches—that there is no youth spirit left to show; the organisation is light-years away from the creativity and sovereignty of many young people in using media and making their voice heard.

At the press conference marking the public announcement of the European Commission’s new strategy for young people “Youth — Investing and Empowering“, all that the Youth Forum’s President Tine Radinja managed to achieve is that Jan Figel—Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth and anything but a talented speaker—shines as a seemingly gifted rhetoric.

Is this the voice of young people in Europe?

How is an organisation defending the interests of young people in Europe that doesn’t have the courage to criticise the blatant discrepancy between the Commission’s ambitions in addressing disadvantaged young people and the tools they employ to this end?

How is an organisation defending the interests of young people that lets itself be willingly abused as a tokenistic symbol of pseudo-representation?

It isn’t — no matter how many times it is written or said to be the biggest regional youth platform in the world, bringing together and representing tens of millions of young people from all over Europe.

Photo by warein.holgado on flickr

It would be too easy an explanation to point at the considerable amount of 2.2 Million Euro the European Youth Forum receives every year from the European Union through the Youth in Action Programme.

The EU, even though they would have the leverage, doesn’t need to apply any thumbscrews.

Faced with a structure that fails to protect the interests of small organisations and offers no efficient instruments to constructively negotiate and mediate between different wings, the organisation consistently blocks itself and is as meek as a mouse.

[The alarmingly high turnover of staff is but one indicator for the state of the association, in which the creativity and enthusiasm of individuals seems forfeit to vanish.]

Not surprisingly, the European Commission does not miss a single opportunity to praise the European Youth Forum as an important and reliable partner — smothered in harmony they can hardly breathe, and any criticism towards the institutions is systematically silenced.

For many years, interest in creating an alternative platform has remained low, also because there is so little at stake in a democratically defunct European Union — but sooner or later the much needed alternative will emerge.

Chances are that such a platform will be taken seriously — not because they brag to be the biggest organisation on the continent in every speech, but because they have something meaningful to say in ways which are authentic and honest, direct and powerful.

And when all is said and done, chances are that the European Youth Forum is going to find itself in a much stronger position after what will likely be turbulent times.

‧ Full disclosure: I was a member of the Bureau of the European Youth Forum from 1998 until 2000 with responsibility for education and training, and an unsuccessful candidate for Secretary General in 2003. If you are inclined to believe that I am searching for romantic memories or bitter revenge, feel free to do so.

I have never tried this, but I think an answer to the question “What is the intercultural dimension of your project?” that goes in the direction of

“you know, our youth exchange focuses on the environment as well as sustainable development and, frankly, we don’t have the time to deal with issues of culture to the extent necessary to really develop a meaningful intercultural learning dynamic. Of course we will facilitate the development of the group, which is made up of a diverse and multicultural mix of individuals so that they can learn from each other and everyone’s valuable experiences. But we don’t want to half-heartedly pretend we will do intercultural learning when we don’t even have the time to cover our own topic. I’d rather not pretend that the international evening will give us an intercultural learning result.”

might not be very pleasing to those deciding who gets funding.

Or would it? Why not?

So many topics are relevant to non-formal education with young people in (and beyond) Europe. Human rights, violence, participation, citizenship, gender equality, sustainable development, to name but a few, are incredibly important and each one deserves time, focus and competence. None of these topics, however, are mandatory to be included in publicly funded projects at the European level. No one asks you to cover sustainable development when your primary topic is gender equality.

Why is the story so different with intercultural learning?

Anyone who takes intercultural learning seriously will hopefully agree that digging deep into the topic of culture and the twisted side-paths of identity, politics and policy, communication and social interaction — that all this demands time, focus and a specific decision to do so. Real intercultural learning, like any profound learning experience, has to be planned and implemented in full knowledge of its complexity and the conditions of work these demand.

It is never as simple as “we do an international evening, therefore we have intercultural learning”. There is a profound—and often confused—difference between intercultural learning within a project and the intercultural dimension of a project.

Almost any group of people that comes together has some degree of diversity. Depending on how strict you are with your definition of ‘culture’ you will find an intercultural dimension in almost any group. The likelihood, however, that a group of people, where almost every person comes from a different geographical location, grew up in a different socio-political environment, with a different family structure and a different educational pathway, will require specific facilitation to overcome differences or obstacles to working effectively together as a result of their diversity is quite high.

There is always diversity in a group | Photo by Maistora

In other words:

An international group has in almost all cases a significant intercultural dimension that can be used as an educational vehicle.

Embracing the richness of diverse groups and using it for the purposes of learning—what-ever that may be constituted by—can offer great opportunities to participants to develop their communication skills, tolerance of ambiguity, empathy and to interpret situations from different angles and perspectives other than their own.

But could that already be considered real intercultural learning?

In my opinion (and experience) intercultural learning is not only and exclusively reflected in intercultural interaction, even though this should always be a part of it. It is, as mentioned above, linked to political education, knowledge about culture and the capacity for successful social interaction.

Maybe one of the problems of Intercultural Learning is it’s label or name, which is unclear and fuzzy as it describes a process: learning that is characterised by the adjective intercultural. I would, therefore, like to suggest to just leave Intercultural Learning aside for a while and call it Diversity Education. Take a look at it from a different angle.

Practitioners of Human Rights Education refer sometimes to their field of activity as educating for, about and through human rights. This differentiation can be helpful also when thinking about Diversity Education. In this light education about diversity could include topics such as culture, power relations, minority issues, communication, (social) inclusion policies, cultural rhetoric, conflict transformation and many more.

Education for diversity would have a clear political aim or fostering a culture of human rights and helping people in understanding the complexities of modern realities as well as supporting their desire to work for open societies and mutual respect among diverse people.

Education through diversity would use contexts with many layers of diversity as an educational vehicle for reflecting participants’ own innate diversity. It would use co-operation and joint projects as challenging and catalysing stimulators for reflection and learning. If Intercultural Learning could encompass what I just described as Diversity Education, it could develop into a crucial and dynamic, complex but tangible field of educational praxis in Europe and anywhere else.

So, to conclude, and humble as this author’s opinion may be, it is fine for institutions to ask how the intercultural dimension of the group will be handled. But this should not be confused with intercultural learning. There is only so much ground to cover in one week and youth workers should be honest with that in application forms, and funding institutions should be realistic as to how much they can expect. Particularly when the youth exchange, the seminar or the training course is not specifically on intercultural learning!

Strange as it may seem, giving intercultural learning the recognition that it deserves might mean it should no longer be mandatory.

If researchers, policy makers and educational practitioners can agree that intercultural learning is a field of educational activity that stands on the same line such as human rights or citizenship education; and if the tool-box approach to pressing 1.5 hours of intercultural learning into any gathering of young people is discouraged; and if we clearly distinguish between a responsible and sustainable management of a group’s intercultural dimension and intercultural learning…

then we might actually promote the understanding of complexity,
rather than the promotion of simplifications.