Pedagogy of Entanglement: A Response to the Complex Societal Challenges that Permeate Our Lives

Abstract

As myriad interconnected societal challenges permeate contemporary society (e.g. climate change and challenges posed by an increasingly multicultural, globalized, and digitalized society), this dissertation revolves around the question: what kind of pedagogy does justice to the experience and challenge of living in a complex world? Understanding education itself as a complex process (i.e. inherently open, semiotic, and recursive), this study aims to articulate so-called helpful perspectives that can enable teachers to make meaning of and shape their own teaching in response to complex societal challenges. To articulate such perspectives, I distinguish between the praxiological (i.e. educational settings, methods, teaching styles, etc.) and the axiological (i.e. purposes that provide focus and orientation) dimensions of pedagogical theorizing. Methodologically, this dissertation consists of three interweaving threads of inquiry: (1) narrative diffractive inquiry with a diverse group of 12 teachers as co-researchers over a period of two years, (2) literature study at the intersection of complexity/relational thinking and pedagogical theory, and (3) autoethnography focusing on personal engagement with educational innovation experiments. The inquiry starts with an exploration of the nature of students’ relationship to complex societal challenges. This initial inquiry is structured in three steps. First, I perform a critical reading of a preparative-logic to education and its tendency to install dichotomies in terms of readiness. Second, together with the 12 teachers as co-researchers I explore exemplary teaching experiences in which students actively participate in complex societal challenges. Third, I explore the insight – that emerges in this process – that complex societal challenges weave through societal structures and that students are always already part of such challenges through their evolving biographies. Building on, especially, the theorizing of Tim Ingold and Karen Barad, I foreground the understanding of students’ relationship to complex societal challenges as one of entanglement (i.e. they are simultaneously shaped by and shapers of them in their paths through the world). The remainder of the dissertation is structured around an in-depth inquiry with teachers as co-researchers based on the collaborative writing, rewriting, and interpretation of scripts revolving challenging educational situations in which students’ entangledness foregrounds (e.g. students initiating a sustainability committee). Weaving autoethnography and literature study through this process, I end up with six helpful perspectives for teaching the entangled student. In brief, these perspectives are: (1) entanglement-orientedness (axiology): the orientation toward a collective sense of us in which individuality is engendered. (2) entanglement-awareness (axiology): critical awareness of one’s dynamic entangledness in the world-in-motion. (3) hopeful action (axiology): actions that work to conserve, adapt, or regenerate a world in which entangled flourishing is possible. (4) inquiry within complex societal challenges (praxeology): an iterative process of opening, organizing, and consolidating collaborative and active learning within the context of a particular societal challenge that touches students’ lives. (5) practicing perceptiveness (praxeology): the ongoing effort of a teacher to sense topical and cultural opportunities and obstructions for collaborative inquiry. (6) practicing integrity (praxeology): the ongoing effort of a teacher to be true to a pedagogical cause, oneself, and professional community as inquiry unfolds.