Going With the Flow or Against the Grain: Transgressive Learning and Disruptive Capacity-Building in a Time of Global Systemic Dysfunction

• In Event: The Armageddon Club: Educating for the Future of Humanity — Educating Toward Equitable Futures 2

Abstract

Education is increasingly considered a mechanism for creating resilient ‘life-long’ learners who can easily adapt to changing circumstances in times of rapid innovation and, nowadays, changing social-ecological circumstances that include changes in climate, migration patterns, access to clean air, water, land, etc. A key element of this narrative is that learners need to be entrepreneurial, autonomous, responsive, strategic, unique and able to take care of themselves. Arguably doings so is a from destructive socialization, one that results in education which privileges ‘skills’ that help strengthen these qualities, strengthens values of individualism, competition and opportunism, while failing learners in helping them discover their own identity, qualities, entanglement and place in the world. Drawing from research within the ISC-funded T-Learning project and a Special Issue from EPAT on Education for Sustainable Development in the ”Capitalocene” that I co-edited (Pedersen et al, 2021), I will highlight the importance of a counter narrative that can help disrupt these stubbornly hegemonic patters. This counter-narrative is one of transgressive learning and disruptive capacity building as a component of more relational and transformative ecologies of learning that work towards eco-socialization, eco-subjectification and eco-qualification.

Transgression, disruption and resistance, inevitably will lead to tensions, conflicts, controversy and discomfort, but it is therein where critical consciousness and spaces for fundamental change can arise. When this disruptive work can be combined with participation in social movements and transition niches that provide concrete utopias and viable alternatives, more hopeful energizing and regenerative cultures can unfold (Wals, 2021). In this contribution I will highlight some examples of such forms of transgressive learning which, so far exist usually outside or on the edges of schools and universities, often in loose intentional networks like the Youth Climate Strike movement, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, but also in intentional communities seeking to go off-the-grid by creating more localized sustainable energy cooperatives, food systems and green urban renewal.
Often these initiatives allow for community-building, socio-emotional engagement in issues alongside critical investigation of facts and myths, as well as the use of arts-based and imaginative processes that lead to creative and hopeful alternative practices and possibilities. These ‘transition niches’ and social movements in which they are often anchored, represent a great opportunity for education as they provide living laboratories for counter-hegemonic education. Fortunately there is an urgently needed surge of initiatives, practices, tools and methods that recognize both the urgency of our planetary crisis and the fact that forms of resistance and transgression make both pedagogical and existential sense. A key challenge for education seeking to contribute to a more sustainable world is to find ways to connect to these niches and movements.

Author

• Arjen E. Wals, Wageningen University