Re-Creating Social Futures: The Role of Moral Imagination in Alternative Education

• In Event: Public Scholarship, Development, and Research With Transformative Agendas: A Vygotskian Approach to Passionate Egalitarianism

Abstract

Alternative education has existed for as long as public education. Sometimes called second chance schooling, there is often a stigma attached to the students who attend these schools and the teachers who work with them. There is also heated debate around alternative schooling; that it allows public schools to push out students who are different, and that it provides a “stop gap” measure so that public schools do not need to change to meet the needs of the students who have historically been pushed out (Kelly, 1993).

While there is little doubt that alternative schools may be “spaces of difference” (Vadeboncoeur, 2009) and that, together, students and teachers in alternative schools may form “communities of difference” (Vellos, 2009), research suggests that a central feature of alternative education is its potential for engaging students and teachers in projects of the moral imagination, or the learning, unlearning, and transforming how we create social relationships with others, how we see ourselves in relationships, how we value others and see the value in them, and how we make decisions regarding what it means to become a good, kind, and/or empathic person.

Grounded in Vygotsky’s (1997, 2004) perspectives on moral education, imagination, and creativity, the purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which engagement in alternative schools shapes the moral imagination of students and teachers. This paper presents critical qualitative data from across three studies—in the US, Australia, and Canada—with youth and teachers in alternative school settings. The data include observations, interviews, field notes and informal conversations, as well as documents for each of three sites. Data was analyzed using thematic and critical discourse analysis.

What emerges across these sites is the participants’—both students and teachers—attention to social relationships, their interest in learning how to relate to each other respectfully and openly, and in so doing, to transform how they relate to and value each other. This process is transformative in a number of ways: it allows students and teachers in relation to reflect on and consider what they value in each other and themselves, to consider how they see themselves and who they are becoming and, ultimately, to recreate social futures together.

Authors

• Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, The University of British Columbia

• Renira Elyodi Vellos, The University of British Columbia