Why we offer alternative pedagogies…
What is an alternative pedagogy?
In the world of pedagogy: the science and the art of education, we seem to have lost the idea that in the midst of all of the techniques and ideas that enthral the world of the teacher, there is a very real world of the learner who has yet to recognise in themselves their inner teacher, their inner tutor of what it is that can bring the greatest happiness or sense of fulfilment in their own terms.
Key words here: in their own terms, not ours, who have had our time in the walled classroom!
We are coming into a realisation that the classroom has no walls, no walls of brick, steel or glass, increasingly fewer methodological walls and it is hoped that the cultural barriers are also falling.
We too, as teachers, want to learn about all the opportunities that the different technologies bring to the fore, especially the technologies that the youth are engaging with.
However, in the midst of all that there is also a call to the wild which stands almost diametrically opposed to the call of the screen, That call to the wild is the call to involve a respect of nature more, the standards set by a growing awareness of ecological and environmental constraints to economic and material growth.
These positions, though, are not universal and they are still structured by attributes of class and culture: for teachers as well as for students, how do we rise above these attributes as determinants?
Our uLearn Naturally Learners' Co-operative seeks to situate its nexus for learning in the middle of where the learners are, physically and conceptually.
We recognise that learning has many contexts, not least the family and the community and that it also relates to the need to assert the individual in a world where individualism is king.
What better to embrace this tension than the Zulu (Nguni) concept of Ubuntu, which recognises that a person is a person through other people: interdependence. It also recognises that the essence of a person, that which animates and gives meaning is significantly cross-curricular. Science and art are interwoven already in the mind: consider the aesthetics of the flight of the condor as well as its symmetry, velocity and lift.Why should we separate this inner meaningfulness on paper, if it does not enhance my ability to relate to the need to protect the species niche, an extension of my own call to beauty of being and experience.
What is meant here is that within the person as individual, sense making is a drawing together of the various influences of that which animates and makes sense to others in a social, cultural and environmental context.
In this manner, different subject matter, materials, animals, other humans and devices have their anima, so to speak, all of which is brought into a whole within the individual, who makes his/her own meaning or sense of it all. The person that results co-operates with other ones in the family or community to have the same impact upon others.
It is a fractal pattern of behaviour and being, it is recursive, and endogenous to African societies, if Ron Eglash is to be believed, and which can form a basis for constructing a new learning system that will have parallels with other patterns of behaviour in the very societies which are at the margins of those with greater access to wealth, so it has a liberatory ethic too, a radicalist sex appeal as it were, just the thing to assist it to catch on amongst the youth!
Abundance brings, therefore a wealth of learning opportunity to the diverse communities found in the culturally rich inner cities of London, which themselves are undergoing great demographic change. It is also reaching out to the areas of London and the suburbs which are the new London ‘depositories’ of the traditionally ‘hard-to reach’ communities.
Our belief is that if they are hard to reach, it might be more profitable to enable them to reach out from their own learning hubs to where learner facilitating resources are, naturally. Thus we Abundance Centres (UK) keenly supports collectives form co-operatives, real learning foundations.
Mama D - Community Centred Knowledge
Special Advisor,
Abundance Centres (UK)
What is meant here is that within the person as individual, sense making is a drawing together of the various influences of that which animates and makes sense to others in a social, cultural and environmental context.
In this manner, different subject matter, materials, animals, other humans and devices have their anima, so to speak, all of which is brought into a whole within the individual, who makes his/her own meaning or sense of it all. The person that results co-operates with other ones in the family or community to have the same impact upon others.
It is a fractal pattern of behaviour and being, it is recursive, and endogenous to African societies, if Ron Eglash is to be believed, and which can form a basis for constructing a new learning system that will have parallels with other patterns of behaviour in the very societies which are at the margins of those with greater access to wealth, so it has a liberatory ethic too, a radicalist sex appeal as it were, just the thing to assist it to catch on amongst the youth!
Abundance brings, therefore a wealth of learning opportunity to the diverse communities found in the culturally rich inner cities of London, which themselves are undergoing great demographic change. It is also reaching out to the areas of London and the suburbs which are the new London ‘depositories’ of the traditionally ‘hard-to reach’ communities.
Our belief is that if they are hard to reach, it might be more profitable to enable them to reach out from their own learning hubs to where learner facilitating resources are, naturally. Thus we Abundance Centres (UK) keenly supports collectives form co-operatives, real learning foundations.
Mama D - Community Centred Knowledge
Special Advisor,
Abundance Centres (UK)