An Exploratory Workshop at NERA 2024 (Malmö University, Sweden)
Adventures of Education: Desires, Encounters and Differences

Workshop Abstract:
Organizations with self-defined progressive values often engage these challenges by attempting to cultivate change agency in their participants, framing their work within contexts of sustainability, diversity, intercultural collaboration, community belonging, and global solidarity. Change agency, defined here as the capacity for individuals and groups within institutions to activate and align institutional culture, curriculum, practices, and systems in the service of values-concordant, mission-driven change initiatives, is a necessary pre-condition of ethically informed change-making. The institutions that celebrate this concept, however, often manifest a nuanced and paradoxical relationship to change in their day-to-day operations; programs that aim to instruct students in practices of change-making often demonstrate wide gaps between program ideation and implementation. Curriculum is frequently envisioned according to idealized progressive values, but implemented according to unexamined social, cultural, and political habits and practices that may be at odds with the curricular aims. Additionally, underlying beliefs associated with liberal humanism often serve as justifications for progressive visions, despite problems of coloniality and neoliberalism that may be embedded in these visions. As change-oriented educational organizations work to distance themselves from ingrained pedagogical practices and embrace visions that support work across shared global crises, members are often required to work across conflicting values frameworks. Frequently, conflicting psychological, sociocultural, relational, institutional, and legal discourses make elements of program implementation difficult. 

 The exploratory workshop will consider the implications of conflicting discourses that often underly attempts to build educational programming around concepts of change-making, including (but not limited to) neoliberal discourse, neocolonial discourse, decolonial discourse, diversity-equity-inclusion discourse, and trauma-grievance discourse. Case studies from the presenter’s experience working in international schools dedicated to the arts, peace-building, and change-making will provide the opening frame for discussion about ways in which these discourses (and others) presence in self-defined progressive educational communities; participants will explore methods of identifying and attending to these sources of tension to help institutions narrow the gap between practice and vision. Workshop discoveries will support the presenter’s research in change agency and ethical praxis in educational systems, and will be broadly applicable to anyone working to support education for positive social change.