2018 Pedagogy, Otherwise: the Reader was assembled in the context of /and in conversation with the Eco-versities Alliance, a trans-local community of learning practitioners from around the world committed to cultivate and reclaim knowledges, relationships and imaginations. The creation of Pedagogy, Otherwise: the Reader was possible thanks to the Ecoversities Alliance Publication Initiatives 2018. http://ecoversities.org/actions/ We wish to thank ArtsEverywhere.ca for permission to republish most of the texts in the original series Pedagogy, Otherwise which is part of the line of inquiry Learning, Education and Pedagogy. ArtsEverywhere is an online platform for artistic experimentation and exploration of the fault lines of modernity. http://artseverywhere.ca/inquiry/learning-education-pedagogy/ http://artseverywhere.ca/inquiry/pedagogy-otherwise/ Our sincere gratitude also goes to SLOW READER, a resource for de- sign thinking and practice; eds. Ana Paula Pais & Carolyn F. Strauss; published by Valiz, Amsterdam where few texts appeared at first. (www.valiz.nl.) A special and heartfelt thank you goes to Nikolay Oleynikov for his committed engagement in various forms of learning processes, the layout of this workbook, and far beyond. Last but not least, we wish to especially thank all the contributors, friends, compas, comrades, accomplices and amazing self educators for sharing with us their reflections and understandings, their stories, their word(l)s and all their knowledges, with trust, love, accountability and solidarity. Alessandra Pomarico, co-founder of Free Home University, artseverywhere contributor and commissioning editor, Eco-versities Alliance’s member. Audre Lorde Naked Courage Fighting Courage Courage to get up out of the mud Courage to See Courage to plant what’s missing Courage to destroy when necessary Courage to think Courage to re-think Courage to give up Courage Not to give up Courage to speak Courage to Decide Courage to knock at the door of the government Courage to knock down the door of the government Courage to fly. Bread and Puppet Theater Education is part of the apparatus designed to maintain the status quo; schools and universities can be the very place where the mono culture of the mind is forged, and cultural trauma and segregation is perpetuated while knowledge becomes yet another commodity. We mostly refer to education using the dominant discourses editorial notes by Alessandra Pomarico of the colonial, modernist Eurocentric and west- There is general consensus and a vast ernized imaginary, which excludes or attempts body of literature arguing that the ed- to assimilate other systems of knowledge, other ucation system is failing us. In the age cosmogonies and economies. What we need to of a global knowledge economy, the learn today is how we can avoid reproducing production of knowledge is becoming a such asymmetrical, exploitative dynamics towards financial enterprise and the logic of the other beings, and how we can sustain pedago- market regulates every aspect of society, gies that are not based on oppressive, patriar- including how education is organized; we chal, and extractive patterns. Can we imagine a need to analyze the crisis of education non-hegemonic, post-Capitalistic framework for in relation to the larger, self-reproduc- learning? Some argue that we need to unlearn ing, socio-economic and political crisis, before we can learn what we don’t know yet, or which is also a crisis of the imagination. what we once knew and then forgot. Neoliberal forces with their exploitative relationship to the world are putting our If the education system can be the instrument of communities at risk by altering the emer- oppression and subjugation, aggravating polar- gent, relational, and co-dependent char- ization, and causing psychological and cultur- acter of the natural and cultural ecologies al traumas, the process of learning constitutes within which we live. They are destroy- on the other hand a step toward emancipation, ing the commons, including the diversity self-development and collective transformation. of the cultural ones. The primary focus Many radical thinkers in the course of history of a different pedagogy — a pedagogy have attributed to pedagogy a seminal role in the otherwise — should be the promotion of struggle for human rights and in the liberation a different learning that prepares us for an movements. ecologically sustainable and socially just 12\13 future. In the Ecoversities Alliance, a network of people (re-)production, to radically re-imagine our ways and movements from which some of the con- of learning and being. Learning, Education and versations presented in this collection originat- Pedagogy is one of the lines of inquiry in which ed, we believe that to critically reflect on, and we hope to give voice to “a wide range re-imagine the pedagogical process, supporting of perspectives to explore a diversity of ways the formation of autonomous zones of learn- of knowing, attempting to decolonize the ing, is fundamental to any attempt to produce structure of education, contesting universal a paradigmatic shift, necessary in a moment of dominant frames, and focusing on pedagogy social and environmental catastrophe. We also as politics. Artistic perspectives, convivial/ consider that collective learning, and learning militant research, theoretical discourses, as about collectivity, are particularly urgent while well as praxis of both affects and cognition, we witness the privatization and segmentation of embodied and land-based practices – these every sphere of life, an individualistic atomiza- are some of the tools and processes through tion of the human being, and the transformation which we witness how learning communities of community spaces and times, into virtual, so are unfolding in different contexts, reclaim- called “social” media. At costs still hard to eval- ing autonomous yet interconnected zones of uate, both in terms of anthropological behavio- knowledge”. ral changes, emotional isolation and a sense of The conversations conveyed for Pedagogy, disconnection, and of voluntary concessions to a Otherwise: the Reader wish to bring in a radical more and more invasive system of techno- sur- perspective, one that can be informed not only veillance and ultimately to new forms of cyber by critical thinking (as criticism is today easily fascism and mass control. reabsorbed by the hegemonic discourse, follow- ing Rancière) but also by the existing alternative The text-based research around pedagogy has practices, those experiments thriving to reclaim also stemmed within a larger context of inquir- the right to self-organize the learnings (as well ies that the online platform ArtsEverywhere.ca as other fundamental areas of life) assuming the is providing space for, which is where most of responsibility to self-regenerate communities, these articles where initially published. focusing on pedagogy as politics. ArtsEverywhere, created by Musagetes (Ca) with We hope to provide a space to learn how to an international collaborative editorial cohort 14\15 learn from a polyphony of positions, practices, intends to critically reflect on systems of knowledge and experiences; to help the formation of an organic, interdisciplinary, and intersectional reflection, a framework for an open yet situated Despite at Eco-versities Alliance we find proble- discussion around what does it take today to matic the statement the “world is our classroom” unfold learning societies[1] and to co-create really for its implication within a consumerist, colonial useful knowledge.[2]; to further conversations and exoticized view on territories and cultures and gestures around holistic and transformative from which we can extract knowledge from, we learning, and self educate ourselves about peda- support what we call “inquiries in solidarity”, gogies and philosophies that can restore, rebuild a system of visits, residencies and real time / and deepen the connections for the human and real space gatherings, mutual aid initiatives, and ecological wellbeing. peer learning as a way to reinforce our under- standing and develop awareness around the Those invited in this pamphlet reflect hetero- systemic change we are, together, called upon. geneous approaches, contexts and media. The If we are ‘planetary subjects rather than global intention is to make a space for unorthodox agents,’ in the words of Gayatri Spivak [3], then methodologies, divergent ideas, and technolo- our stories, objects, debts, wars, resources, lan- gies emerging from grassroots, queer, informal, [3] Death of Discipline Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri 2003). Press, University Columbia York: (New guages, economies, and cultures are entangled, non-vertical, not-only academic, community- and our destiny is interrelated. In this spirit, the based, and context-oriented processes; we will collection of text here try to balance theoretical consider activist- and artist-led procedures de- and discursive analysis and differently oriented veloping critical learning tools; protocols of [1] Societies: Experiencing the Possibilities.” Learning “Unfolding 15, 2016. May Accessed June 2002. Shiksha: A Bulletin of Shikshantar, Vimukt http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/ls3_intro.htm contributions around pedagogy with intimate convivial and militant researches; insurgent letters, personal commentaries and reflections knowledge from communities in struggle and coming out of enlivened experiences, poems and communities of practices; and investigate the art based