The Education Myth
Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar
Flux Season 1
Mari Casellato
What does it mean to think of comparative education beyond the human? Is our field based on assumptions of individual autonomy and Western Enlightenment thinking that sees time as linear and progress as possible? Does a “posthuman future” hold new possibilities for our research? And can our field live with such dissonance?
Earlier this month, the Post Foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society organized a webinar entitled “Exploring education beyond the human” to think through some of these questions.
The webinar brought together Weili Zhao, Stephen Carney, and Iveta Silova. I moderated the discussion, which explores what education beyond the human would actual look like and entail.
In this special addition of FreshEd, I’m going to replay our conversation because I think the ideas discussed push our field in new and important directions.
Citation: Zhao, Weili, Carney, Stephen & Silova, Iveta, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 178, podcast audio, October 28, 2019. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/beyondhuman/
Transcript, Translation, and Resources:
Education Beyond the Human
What’s the connection between education and climate change? My guest today, Arjen Wals, takes a critical take on sustainability yet offers a hopeful outlook.
In our conversation, Arjen details a few examples of school-level practices that could be seen as working towards a sustainable future while also critiques educational competition and the hidden curriculum of commodification.
He ultimately calls for more dissonance in education systems as a way to learn new forms of sustainability to combat climate change.
Arjen Wals is the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development and Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.
I spoke with Prof. Wals at the 2018 Global Education Meeting, which was a high-level forum held in Brussels in early December that reviewed the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
Citation: Wals, Arjen, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 144, podcast audio, January 14, 2019. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/arjenwals/
Transcript, translation, and resources:
Climate Change, Education, and Sustainability