In this chapter, Judith Terblanche and Charlene van der Walt contend that achieving social transformation in an historical context characterised by race, economic, class, gender and cultural differentiation and encountering the other for deliberation are indispensable to achieve transformation. The authors, however, hold that since encountering the other is limited by the very ideological constructions of otherness, it is imperative that the educational institutions must trigger deliberation among learners with diverse backgrounds responsibly or else the deliberation will not take place. (...) Employing Miroslav Volf’s idea of the drama of embrace and Yusef Waghid’s, Re-visioning education in Africa: Ubuntu-inspired education for humanity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ideas on ubuntu, the authors argue for the role of film in pedagogy to initiate the imperative of encounter that awakens empathy and compassion for the other. Reflecting on and discussing a film creates room for cultivation of skills that would assist the viewing students to take active but otherwise difficult steps of encountering the other. Waghid argues that the centrality of the film is that it projects the moral necessity of deliberatively going through the discomfort of imagining the situationality of the other and taking active real-life steps in ways that are discomforting, risky and vulnerable as the process may be. They thus argue that film is a medium full of potential for initiating a pedagogy of discomfort that emphasises students and teachers moving outside their zones of comfort so that, through the generated discomforting emotions, the stakeholders come to identify and challenge dominant beliefs, practices, habits and prejudices in them and in society largely regarded as unproblematic in order to achieve social transformation. In relation to decoloniality, Terblanche and Van der Walt hold that, apart from the discomforting encounters surfacing, the entrenched structural epistemic violence against other people’s forms of knowledge, pedagogical film engagement could also achieve further decoloniality by foregrounding content and theory that are local and exploring lived experiences that are institutionally regarded as irrelevant, such as indigeneity. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: Andrew D. White Professors-At-Large Program., Speaker: Professor of the History of Philosophy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large., Lecture, October 3, 1988.

This book examines African philosophy of education and the enactment of ubuntu justice through a massive open online course on Teaching for Change. The authors argue that such pedagogic encounters have the potential to stimulate just and democratic human relations: encounters that are critical, deliberate, reflective and compassionate could enable just and democratic human relations to flourish, thus inducing decolonisation and decoloniality. Exploring arguments for imaginative and tolerant pedagogic encounters that could help cultivate an African university where educators and students (...) can engender morally and politically responsible pedagogical actions, the authors offer pathways for thinking more imaginatively about higher education in a globalised African context. This work will be of value for researchers and students of philosophy of education, higher education and democratic citizenship education. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of the worthwhile risk of education, as necessarily involving a transition from one of initiation and risk to that of co-belonging. We commence by considering a contention that while education is a human activity whereby an individual might be initiated into various encounters, the potential experience thereof is as yet un-encountered and strange, and only to be imagined. Following on the idea of education as the subject of imagination—that is, not knowing what to expect beforehand, (...) and thereby being prepared to take some risk—we turn our attention to education as necessarily being accompanied by risk. In this sense, if an individual takes a risk to experience something new and strange, the possibility exists that she could disrupt what she is about to encounter, because engaging with the other, is an activity associated with taking a risk towards increasing imagination. In this way, initiation into something new and strange seems commensurate with the act of taking risks which could involve disruption. By building on ideas of education as a worthwhile risk that engages people deliberatively, we extend our argument to that of education as an initiation into a co-belonging, which recognises people’s ability to both deliberate, and not to deliberate. (shrink)