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Are you interested in radical collaboration as an education form?

Our summary today works with the chapter titled Radical collaboration: flipping the paradigm on learning from 2021 by Kelly Boucher, from the book titled Collaboration, visionaries share a new way of living. This episode is a great preparation for our next interviewee, Kelly Boucher in episode 114. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how to think otherwise of life and place. This chapter presents radically collaborative ways of living well with the world and others in glorious multiplicity and complexity.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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The Euro-Western education system is dominated by development psychology and appropriate practice that charts children’s progress via standardised systems of testing and measuring achievement. This system breeds competition and individualism and views children as fitting neatly into universal developmental milestones. Thus, generating a culture of comparison and competition from the very beginning of a child’s life. This system sees children as deficit and as always in the process of becoming something else. Children seem empty vessels to be filled up with knowledge and skills to grow up into productive economic citizens.

This competition affects parents as well who are asking whether the child is okay, in the proper growth percentile and create a competition among them to find the best schools through the child’s life. However, what is missed in such a standardised view is that childhoods are messy, gloriously complex and vastly different all over the world and their learning experiences can’t be placed neatly into universal categories. Global childhoods are multiple and complex and unfold in a kaleidoscope of family configurations and sociocultural influences.

In a neo-liberal system, the perspective that views children and learners as somewhere to deposite knowledge and skills shows no regard for children’s own voices, agency or competence as active and capable citizens of the now and not just as becoming future adults. Essentially, the western education system seems to view children as in need to be prepared to become good economic citizens which is the ultimate return on investment for governments. Boucher started to wonder whether there is a better way for children and teachers in this environment. There seems to be a community of scholars who engage in theories and ideas through frameworks that offer radically different ways of viewing the world and that turn towards multiplicity and complexity through collective and critical discourse.

In order to flip the paradigm on learning, first we much understand the term pedagogy, according to Boucher. Pedagogy is a term usually used to describe the art of teaching and learning. Pedagogy could be the agency that joins teaching and learning, but it can evolve to an active dialogue with the world. This dialogue or becoming is an embodied practice of living well and is not confined to the traditional realm of education. This notion of pedagogy is collective, collaborative and relational, in that we are called into the act of world-making.

Thinking pedagogy as living well with the world is a radical concept for the western education system, but these are not new ideas – this concept is a response to and a thinking with indigenous relational worldviews. First Nations – usually referring to Indigenous people – perspectives are active and lively where humans and non-humans – the country, landforms, animals, spirit, plants, minerals – are intricately connected and in relation with each other at all times. Being in relation can mean, according to Aboriginals, that the boundaries between humans and nature are blurred because everything is animate. Indigenous relational worldviews are agentic, active, alive and thinking, and they foreground knowledge that is learnt, experienced and revealed and that all entities through relationship are equal.

Through these multiple perspectives and imaginative artistic and conceptual lens suggests Boucher a radical re-learning of the educational system. This can reprogram our neurology to think otherwise by taking up our citizenship in the world collectively and in relation. In doing so, we take up our responsibility and step into radical collaboration with the world. Some questions need to be asked like what are unasked-for obligations? How do we handle these? How might we take up such obligations as a collective even when these obligations leave us entangled, slightly bewildered and somewhat disoriented? What does taking responsibility look like in our embedded social structures?

The pandemic provided a reset that could be used to re-investigate our systems. A reset that moves us from the dominant education discourse that has embedded in us as products of that system a deficit mindset of individualism and competition. Children can be seen as being in deficit for their education, but perhaps the system is in deficit charging on without any reflection to the chaos ensued during the pandemic. Boucher asks whether this is the best we could do. Could we pause for a moment to see whether this is really the right way? How do we attend the differences in days, the slowness of life? We all have days that are absurd and disconnect us from the collective possibility to now-ness, of cultivating our collective attention and living with the world in all of its magnificent and challenging complexity.

In such complexity, we could sit and think with such disturbing and mixed-up times. We could create inventive connections as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings. Inventive connections can be the ideas, thinkings, noticings, theories and hypotheses in and of the world that come together when we attune to the unfinished configurations that emerge in teaching and living practice and collective thinking. That is radical collaboration. The challenge here is for us to dwell in these places too. To pause and linger for a moment before the analysis comes in. The microbes will get to work to break things down, enrich the soil and activate our thinking, and together our ideas will flourish in multiple, unexpected places.

Radical unlearning and collaboration is a pedagogical response to and with the world, a call to research as learners together in the everyday. The collective disorientation we are experiencing now is painful, difficult and traumatic, yet liberating. The way in which we’re used to seeing the world is being disrupted. The world is demanding more of use now. How might we reorientate ourselves into a collective shape? What does collaboration do and what does collaboration demand of us in this collective space? What if our most radical act of changemaking was in fact collaboration?

When we activate our authentic self-care and take radical responsibility for our own inner transformation and healing, we orient ourselves towards the collective because we get out of our own way and kick our ego-centric righteousness to the curb. This is how we reseed our neurology. We need to critically question our practices and philosophies in order to expand, learn, grow and impact the world. We can active collective critical dialogues to create dynamic and generative conditions for learning. By facilitating robust exchanges within theory and practice, research culture can be nurtured within education settings which in turn helps educators to reconceptualise what teaching and learning could be. This is a collective action, to gather thoughts, ideas, questions, and wonderings to facilitate innovation and changemaking in learning. In this way, we can create new world connections, and generative and holistic relationships fuelled by curiosity and wonder as radical collaborators.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Pedagogy is a term usually used to describe the art of teaching and learning or the agency that joins teaching and learning, but it can evolve to an active dialogue and being in relation with the world.
2. Being in relation can mean, according to Aboriginals, that the boundaries between humans and nature are blurred because everything is animate.
3. Through being in relation and radical re-learning, we take up our responsibility and step into radical collaboration with the world.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What was the last thing you change your mind on – relearned?
2. What is your relation to your environment? How do relate to it?
3. How would you change it when you are conscious of that environment?
4. How and in relation to what can you be a radical collaborator?

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