Pedagogical Faultlines
International Workshop on Alternatives in Education
21 and 22 September 2007
Organized by Waag Society, Sarai (India) and the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.

Themes

1) Extra - institutional Pedagogy

Emerging from crisis within formal educational structures, pedagogical
practices have been forced to move into more ‘informal networks’,
intimating new possibilities of pedagogical forms, structures,
resources and practices. These are sites that open up the question
around the "professionalisation" of pedagogical purposes and also the
nature of the pedagogical intervention, where the role of the teacher
and the learner are routinely destabilized. Traditionally, the
development discourse around knowledge has been in terms of knowledge
transfer (from the more knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable) and
access (for the ‘knowledge deprived’ to ‘information resources’). This
rubric of the programme would suggest instead the need to move away
from the paradigm of ‘transfer and access’ towards paying more
attention to the processes of generating and sustaining different forms
of socially situated creativity and knowledge. The crucial question
that lingers within these practices could be framed as - are these
sites for ways of living in the world or are these just another adjunct
to learning to prepare for the world?

2) New Sources of Knowledge

Over the last decade we have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in
the sites and modalities of knowledge production and access. This
expansion has gestured towards new questions around the authority of
knowledge producers and validity of what would be considered as
knowledge. The question of establishing trust in open formats, of
intellectual integrity and property, of sharing and plagiarism are all
opened up once we enter the world of blogs and wikis, google downloads
and non-moderated discussion lists. Similarly hard questions face us
when we consider the worlds of ‘traditional knowledge’, once derided by
science but increasingly valorized by those in search of alternatives
to the contemporary, that may or may not share the modern practices of
standardization and validation of knowledge. The traffic of content
across languages and cultures through translation, available both in
print and through lists and blogs, provides a third context to think
about new domains of knowledge, this time in the vernacular worlds that
have adapted new media technologies to their own purpose. It is not
enough to bring down the canon. The big challenge would be to
conceptualize the dialogical nature of these knowledge formations,
keeping alive their internal modes of debate, inconsistencies,
conflicts, discussions, contradictions and difference.

3) Social Knowledge and Professional Practice

The making of professional practices draws simultaneously upon
theoretical and practical knowledge. However, the technical and the
social, theoretical and practical coexist not in synchrony but in
tension, with pedagogical practices comfortable with one or the other.
The choice of the technical seeks a neutral, scientific ground while
many accounts opting for social and practice based knowledge often
adopt a populist anti-intellectual agenda. The professional seeks to
discredit ‘lay knowledges’ while the experiential strives to establish
itself as the ground of authenticity, privileging the experience of
distinct social groups over any universal conception of
‘truth’. Further, these tensions play themselves out very differently
in various institutional geographies. The debates in this realm are
simultaneously about power, identity and the nature of modernity in
various parts of the globe and together they pose some of the most
significant challenges to the making of global democratic futures. This
thematic will thus address the tensions between social knowledge and
professional practice as these are taught and experienced in particular
disciplines and across different institutional sites with a view to
linking the question of pedagogy with issues of power and authority,
cultural sensibilities and the multiple ways in which we dwell in the
contemporary.

4) Multi-site Practices

It is a given that people, concepts and practices travel.
Conceptualizing multi-site practices in education oscillates between
the ease of global transfer of best practices and the utter
impossibility of translations across cultural boundaries. This raises
the problem of the travel of situated practices of pedagogy that
address similar concerns and common questions enabling provocations and
inspirations and thus substituting model building exercises for
culturally sensitive pedagogical practices that dialogue through their
difference. Multi-site pedagogical practices is not simply an
invitation to collecting and adding new sites, of arching the different
worlds that exists in any given present, but allowing these various
selves to collide with and infiltrate each other, without the
privileging of any one self over the other. This disturbing, intimate
friction creates new enabling contexts that allow us to imagine the
possibility of a critical and reflective practice of development. In
other words, what is at stake is the fashioning of new terms of
dialogue that allow for mutual learning and sharing across diverse
social and spatial locations, experimenting not only with the
production of content but also the forms and networks through which
these circulate.