Presidential Invited Session: Reflections from marginalized epistemologies on education in the era with COVID and information technology

Group Submission Type: Presidential Invited Sessions

Proposal

This session aims to look for hints for overcoming today’s educational challenges in traditional philosophies on education and knowledge from different societies across the world.

COVID pandemic forced schools to be closed down at a massive scale both in developing and developed countries. This became a painful but unique opportunity for us to reflect on the meaning of school and learning. What would it mean not to stop learning while face-to-face schooling was pended? A new kind of educational gap emerged, depending on the availability of the facilities and equipment, such as tablet computers and the internet, to continue learning at home. At the same time, educational programs enabled by information technologies personalized the learning process, which adapts the paths, contents, and levels according to individual interests and progress. Such personalization potentially leads to a contrasting notion of learning from curricular-based schooling designed to effectively teach children of the same grade level.

The knowledge-based economy shortens the life cycle of knowledge demanded in economic activities, and without the ability to constantly update their knowledge, people will find it difficult to keep their jobs and adapt to societal changes. Today, the media often report an urgent need for upskilling adult workers to keep up with industries’ demands, and various educational service providers advertise programs for adult learners in skills for improved performance at work, such as computer programming, foreign languages, and management.

In recent educational discourse, we often hear the voices to promote lifelong learning to meet the changing needs of society. However, such is an argument unconsciously based on the assumption that the school is almost the only place to learn and that learning is predominantly the act of youths. However, many societies have philosophies that consider learning as a lifelong process embedded in society and closely linked with learners’ psychology. These philosophies have been marginalized in the course of modernization, and we are immersed in the value framework of western epistemology.

In the face of historical challenges to school-based education, it would be meaningful for us to revisit those marginalized philosophies of knowledge. By doing so, we would be able to shed light on those challenges from perspectives that are not conditioned by individualism, objectivism, and curriculum-based ideas of education, which we take as given too often.

This panel session will be composed of 3 presentations. The first presenter will discuss the epistemological lessons by revisiting traditional oral cultures in Africa for considering learning and knowledge acquisition. The second presenter will share the examples of applying educational philosophy embedded in Chinese culture with long history in the pedagogy and programs in contemporary schools to address challenges for human survival, safety and sustainability. The third presenter will present the cases collected from Latin America and Caribbean region widely in which both the public and private actors participate to benefit from the plurality of knowledge and modes of learning in contemporary educational scenes.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• Knowledge shared and sympathized: Epistemological lessons from African traditional oral culture to the modern IT-driven and with-COVID society - Shoko Yamada, Nagoya University

• Philosophy In Action: Innovative and Effective Approaches to Ethical and Equitable Education in China - Di Xu, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Lu Leng, Jinan University, Guangzhou

• What does learning mean to people? ―What marginalized knowledge suggests for the concept of inclusion - Miki Sugimura, Sophia University

• Embedding Local Knowledge in Higher Education Curriculum: A Social Responsibility Perspective - Sheng-Ju Chan, National Chung Cheng University

Discussant

• Jun Li, Western University