Francqui International Interuniversity Professorship

“LEARNING IN PUBLIC SPACES: THEORISING AND RESEARCHING CIVIC LEARNING”

Seminar April 1^st  2011

INTRODUCTION

The contributions to this seminar explore a range of issues: different theoretical tools for understanding civic learning, the role of education in promoting civic learning, the wider transformations in the settings and practices in which civic learning might occur etc..

Gert Biesta will open the discussion by summarizing the main ideas and issues presented in his inaugural lecture and by making a case that an adequate theory of civic learning needs to operate at the intersection of political theory, learning theory and educational theory.

Each presenter/team of presenters will have a 30 minute slot. About 20 minutes should be devoted to the presentation itself and a further 10 minutes to engage explicitly with the issues raised in the inaugural lecture. For this part we have formulated a number of questions which we ask the participants to address, creatively and critically, not in an abstract sense but in function of their own contribution, and their own insights and understandings.

Below you will find a brief reminder of the some of the key ideas of the inaugural lecture, and a number of questions to guide the presentations and discussion.

KEY IDEAS FROM THE INAUGURAL

The lecture started with outlining a number of distinctions, which can be seen as options for locating a discussion about citizenship. This was done in the form of the following questions:

Should we understand citizenship a social or a political identity? (If citizenship is seen as a social identity, then there may be a tendency to see plurality and difference as a threat to the strength of the social fabric, whereas if we see it as a political identity then plurality and difference become the very raison d'etre of citizenship.)

Should we understand democracy as order or dis-order? (Can we express democracy in positive terms as a value-based order, or does the very idea of democracy require that it exceeds order?)

Should we understand democracy as normal or sporadic? (Should the focus be on establishing democracy, or should we be interested in moments of democratisation – moments that always reconfigure the existing order with reference to the value of equality?)

Is democratic agency therefore a matter of identification (with a particular order) or dis-identification or subjectification?

Depending on our answers to these questions – or to put it differently: depending on where we position ourselves in relation to these choices – civic learning then either becomes a process of socialisation or a process of subjectification.

This, in turn, leads to the 'choice' between civic learning as learning for future citizenship or learning from current citizenship.

If we approach civic learning in terms of subjectification, then the learning can be characterised as being non-linear, recursive and cumulative.

Civic learning in the subjectification 'mode' follows from engagement in the 'experiment of democracy.' This experiment should not be understood as the accumulation of individual preferences, but as the transformation of private 'wants' into collective goods. The public sphere has historically been the place where this transformation was enacted. In our times the public sphere is threatened from two sides: (the logic of) the market and (the logic of) the private. If the public sphere is the sphere where the experiment of democracy can be conducted, than what we need if we are concerned about the future of democracy is not well-educated 'good' citizens, but more public sphere, more opportunities for enacting the experiment of democracy. Civic learning in the subjectification mode is, in a sense, the kind of learning that constitutes places as public places.

QUESTIONS FOR THE DISCUSSION

What does the particular contribution help us to see about how we define, understand and theorise civic learning?

How and to what extent does this support ideas set out in the inaugural lecture?

How and to what extent does it challenge these ideas?

How and to what extent does it augment these ideas?

And perhaps in the case of more empirical case studies:

- Is democracy happening? Where? How? For whom?

- Is any civic learning happening? Where? How? By whom?

- Does that say anything about the desirability of particular practices/actions/interventions?

Plus two more general questions:

Is the subjectification conception of civic learning a more viable way to understand civic learning than the socialisation conception?

Does it provide a better/more interesting/more fruitful starting point for understanding educational 'work' (including social work) in relation to citizenship and democracy?

PROGRAMME

9.30-9.45: Short introduction to the main ideas of the inaugural lecture (Gert Biesta)

9.45-10.15

Emancipatory Prevention: a Contribution from an Ethical Viewpoint

NICOLE VETTENBURG (Gent)

'Prevention is better than cure!' We all seem to agree about that. But because prevention is being used in a variety of contexts it is no longer clear what we agreed. Prevention has lost its clear definition. Moreover prevention is not in all cases better than cure. Prevention intrudes on the interaction of individuals with society.  To do this thoughtlessly may well limit people's development opportunities. Excluding every possible risk can create excuses for unethical control over certain target groups. This shows that prevention is not a neutral notion. In addition to defining prevention this article introduces the concept of 'emancipatory prevention', through which a theoretical framework is presented for the development of prevention based on emancipation principals. This framework investigates the opportunities to respond as soon as possible to perceived problems, thereby increasing the options for everyone involved, taking into account the individual and the context. Participation of the target group, without excluding any members, is essential. The moral acceptability of the aims of a prevention initiative tends to be overlooked because of the focus on efficiency and effectiveness. 'Emancipatory prevention' is intended to ensure that the ethical viewpoint of preventive work is taken into account.

10.15-10.45

Zinneke Parade: Community building as intensification of the urban condition

PETER REYSKENS AND JOKE VANDENABEELE (KULeuven)

Cities are seen as spaces that juxtapose diverse populations, as nodes in networks of transnational mobility, as endless sprawls of passage and exchange. Inhabitants of the city no longer seem bound to it by civic participation and civic learning and cities are often described as lacking the sense of community and identity. Community building practices like the Zinneke Parade in Brussels are mainly organized and theorized to rebuild community as a social identity. Simultaneously, we find plea’s to recast community building practices to a greater or lesser extent towards a more politicized practice. Our reading of the parade in the streets of Brussels, however, results in a slightly different view. Reading the parade along the lines of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy brings us at a point where we see community building practices neither as working towards a social identity, nor working towards political participation. We look at the parade as an exposition towards others who pass and who leave an impression on us. This passing and impressing is an intensification of the urban condition. The learning at stake here, is exposing and mixing that is not in itself political or social, but that has to do with the sense or desire for living together.

10.45-11.15

Socio-technical approaches and experimental ethnographic methodology

MATHIAS DECUYPERE AND CARLIJNE CEULEMANS (KULeuven and University of Antwerp)

Both our research projects develop a socio-technical approach to study educational practices in-the-making. Socio-technical approaches, more broadly known as science and technology studies (STSs) and incorporating specific strands as actor-network theory (ANT) amongst others, accentuate the intricate mixture of, and the according fuzzy distinctions between, ‘the social’ and ‘the material’, ‘the human’ and the ‘non-human’ – and, hence, the meaninglessness of maintaining these often taken-for-granted ontological divisions (Latour, 2005; Miller, 2009). The consequential focus of socio-technical approaches, then, is the detailed description of emerging socio-technical assemblages by observing the interplay between specific (material or textual) objects, instruments, procedures and practices. To approach educational practice at the level of assemblages implies to focus on the composition of three elements: particular agents with a particular self-understanding (e.g. academics; teachers; policy makers); particular materials co-constituting the assemblage (e.g. the academic’s office as a particular emplacement of closets, desk and electronic equipment; a professional profile listing competencies for the qualified teacher); and particular interactions those two (e.g. the academic communicating in her office by grace of specific material instruments; the teacher educator evaluating the student teacher by means of the basic competencies deduced from the professional profile). According to us, the ethnographic and cartographic methodologies building on socio-technological approaches offers experimental ways to conduct empirical educational research by taking into account the specific context (and consequential materiality) of each investigation on the one hand, and by giving way to the complexity and messiness inextricably coupled with the conduct of research in this vein (Law, 2004) on the other. The notion of experiment is understood here in a very particular sense referring towards a situation in which you don’t know what you don’t know (Ahrens, 2010) and holding some similarities with the fundamentally open and possibly transformative experiment of democracy (Biesta, 2011).

11.15-11.45

How social are social skills? Community as the work of the social.

JOB DEMEYERE (Lerarenopleiding Vorselaar, Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen)

ILSE GEERINCK (Laboratorium voor Educatie en Samenleving, K.U.Leuven)

Today – especially in primary school – we can notice a growing interest for practicing social skills in order to develop the social condition of human people. A well-know method to learn and achieve social skills as well as to reflect about one’s own social skills is the ‘axenroos’ of Ferdinand Cuvelier. The term ‘ax’ refers thereby to the individual capacity to behave oneself in a certain manner, viz. as a social human being and is made visible by the images of ten animals and their qualities. From our point of view, the ‘axenroos’ shows very clearly how we think today about the social and the related conception of civility, namely that it is directed towards certain behaviour that can be learned by the appropriation of certain skills (‘competences’). The aim of this research is however to rethink the social. While the social is regarded today as an effect of a private and individualized property (‘competence’) that one can mobilize/deploy in order to behave social, we will argue that the social is – on the contrary – precisely that space in which a common or non-privatised experience can take place. Community, so we will argue with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben – is not the effect of a certain achievement, i.e. the appropriation of a certain social knowledge or competence - but the experience of being de-appropriated and of an openness towards an original commonness which can only be shared with others instead of individually possessed. At the end we will show that social (or civil) behaviour is not a matter of the achievement of (a list of) social competences but can only be ‘learned’ by the look from no-where: in the ‘look’ one is being put besides oneself and an experience of pure communality takes place.

11.45-12.30: DISCUSSION

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-14.00

Social identity formation of young people and their attitudes towards Others

SARAH MEYS (Leuven)

Central in our research stands the question of the effect of the geography of social networks of young people on their social identity and attitudes towards Others. The intention here is to focus on which effect deep and superficial contacts have on attitude formation, and on the relationship between attitudes and social identity, based on literature research. The construction of a social identity is often founded on the connection with a place and the people that are in contact with each other there. In- and out-groups towards which the attitudes differ, are being constructed in the mental as well as physical space. Our goal here is to be able to explain the diversity in created images and positions from a geographical perspective.

14.00-14.30

Re-balancing the concept of reflexivity in the context of social learning for democratic, transboundary governance: The case of the Orca Pass Initiative

HENRIETTE BASTRUP BIRK (KULeuven)

Noting that social learning theorizing, situating reflexivity in the context of multi-actor engagement, tends to relate this concept primarily to critical questioning of obsolete or dysfunctional assumptions inherited from the past, we advocate granting imagination a more prominent place within this concept. This, we argue, will serve to relate reflexivity also to bold and, to times, subversive envisioning within a collective.

14.30-15.00

Learning from sustainable development. Citizenship education in the light of public issues.

KATRIEN VAN POECK & JOKE VANDENABEELE (KULeuven)

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is increasingly affecting environmental education policy and practice. We analyzed how the mainstream interpretation of educational challenges in relation to sustainable development runs the risk of translating sustainability issues into learning problems of individuals. Sustainable development is mainly seen as a problem that can be tackled by applying the proper learning processes. We present a different perspective on education in the context of sustainable development. In our view, the principal challenge for environmental education practices facing ESD policy and discourse is to present sustainable development as a ‘public issue’. From this point of view, education is strongly connected with democracy. We connect our democratic interpretation of the educational process that is needed with novel ways of thinking about citizenship education. The focus is no longer on the competences that citizens must achieve, but on the democratic nature of the spaces and practices in which participation and citizenship can develop. In our research, we will inquire into the extent to which educational practices are able to deal with sustainable development as a public issue and examine what kind of practices of civic learning are emerging in this context. In this seminar I will present the way in which we address this issue in our case study.

15.00-15.30

Intercultural learning on the shop floor. Possibilities and limitations of reflective learning.

NATHALIE SCHIPPERS (Université de Liège – K.U.Leuven)

An empirical study was carried out in a car assembly factory, looking for instances of reflective intercultural learning among blue collar workers. The assumption that working together in a multicultural environment would lead to questioning one's own visions and values and eventually to understanding of the other, however, did not seem to fit to the reality of the shop floor. After observing the scarce possibilities for workers on the shop floor to learn reflectively from their encounters with difference, an attempt is made to conceptualise intercultural learning in other ways. It is noticed that workers do make the daily confrontation with differences manageable; the workers learn to take an attitude of mild indifference (Van Leeuwen, 2003) which helps them to get used to phenomena without necessarily understanding them.  The workers develop ordinary cosmopolitanisms (Lamont & Aksartova, 2002); rhetorics in which they ground their antiracist views. It seems thus possible to conceptualise intercultural learning in other terms than reflection, understanding and empathy. Notwithstanding the value attributed to these ways of dealing with a diverse environment, it is argued that also for blue collar workers the opportunity has to be created to come to deeper learning as reflective learning or learning as responding. This learning however needs time away from work, it needs interruption, suspension.

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15.30 – 16.45: Discussion in groups

16.45-17.30: Plenary discussion and concluding statement (Gert Biesta)