Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

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Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review is a biannual (Spring and Autumn), peer reviewed, open access, online journal published by the Centre for Global Education, a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast. It aims to celebrate and promote good practice in development education and to debate the shifting policy context in which it is delivered. It provides a space for education practitioners to critically reflect on their practice, share new research and engage in debate with their peers. Each issue of the journal features in-depth contributions on key aspects of development education such as pedagogical innovation, research, methodologies, monitoring and evaluation, the production of resources, enhancing organisational capacity and strategic interventions in education policy. Policy & Practice is informed by values such as social justice, equality and interdependence and is based on the Freirean concept of education as an agent of positive social change.  The journal web site receives iover 200,000 visitors per annum from the global North and South and successfully combines quality contributions from academia and civil society.  Journal editor Stephen McCloskey can be contacted at stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com.

The Centre for Global Education is grateful to Irish Aid - the arm of the Irish Government responsible for overseas aid and development education - which has funded the journal since its inception in 2005, and to the Irish development agency, Concern Worldwide, for funding the journal’s new web site.  Centre for Global Education has taken care to ensure that Policy and Practice has been published to high ethical and professional standards. 

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Users can use, reuse, share, adapt and build upon the material published in the journal for any purpose as long as appropriate credit is given to the original source and the relevant article is properly cited. Policy & Practice is available on the EBSCO journals platform. 

ISSN: 1748-135X

Politique et Pratique, Analyse critique de l'Education au Développement, est un magazine semestriel en libre accès, évalué par des intervenants et praticiens de ce secteur et produit par le Centre for Global Education (Centre pour l'Éducation Mondiale). La revue est financée par Irish Aid et Concern Worldwide. Lancé en 2005, Politique et Pratique attire un nombre croissant de lecteurs internationaux.  En 2015, le site web du journal a reçu 150 000 visiteurs issus de 150 pays différents, avec en particulier des lecteurs de Grande-Bretagne, Irlande, Amérique du Nord, et -dans l'hémisphère Sud- Australie, Afrique du Sud, Philippines, Indonésie et Inde.  

La revue a pour but de souligner et promouvoir les exemples de bonnes pratiques en matière d'Education au Développement et d'analyser le contexte politique instable au coeur duquel elle doit être livrée.  Politique et Pratique est ancré sur des valeurs telles que la justice sociale, l'égalité et l'interdépendance. Le journal est basé sur le concept Freirien de l'éducation en tant qu'agent positif du changement social.Le journal épouse l'idée de praxis -un processus d'analyse, de réflexion et d'action- qui permet à l'étudiant de devenir un citoyen actif au niveau local et mondial.  

Le Centre for Global Education tient à remercier Irish Aid -la section gouvernementale de l'Etat Irlandais chargée de l'aide au développement et de l'éducation au développement- qui a financé la revue depuis sa création en 2005, ainsi que l'agence de développement Irlandaise, Concern Worldwide, pour avoir financé le site web de la revue.  Nous espérons que le site et son contenu vous seront utile dans vos études. 

ISSN: 1748-135X

Política y Práctica: una revista de Educación para el Desarrollo  (Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review) es una revista bi-anual, revisada por pares y de acceso libre, publicada por el Centro de Estudios Globales (Centre for Global Education) y financiada por Irish Aid y Concern Worldwide. Lanzada en el 2005 Policy & Practice tiene cada vez más lectores a nivel internacional. En el 2015, la página web recibió a 150,000 visitas procedentes de 150 países, especialmente de Gran Bretaña, Irlanda, EE.UU. y Canadá, y en el Sur,  principalmente en Australia, Sudáfrica, las Filipinas, Indonesia y la India.

La revista tiene como objetivo destacar y promover las buenas prácticas en el ámbito de la educación para el desarrollo y estimular el debate sobre el contexto político que vive esta disciplina en la práctica. La revista está basada en valores como la justicia social, la igualdad y la interdependencia, y está fundada en la idea de Freire de la educación como agente de un cambio social positivo. La revista destaca la idea de ‘praxis’  un proceso de análisis, reflexión y acción que empodera a la persona que aprende para que pueda convertirse en un o una ciudadana activa, tanto a nivel local como global.

El Centro de Estudios Globales agradece a Irish Aid (la agencia del gobierno de Irlanda responsable de la ayuda externa y la educación para el desarrollo) por el financiamiento a la revista desde su fundación en el 2005. También estamos agradecidos a la agencia del desarrollo Irlandés, Concern Worldwide, la cual ha financiado la nueva página web de la revista. Esperamos que este sitio web y su contenido sean una contribución para el aprendizaje. 

ISSN: 1748-135X

issue Issue 39

The Paradox of Educational Silences and Cacophonies in Liquid Modernity

Critical and de-/post-/anti-colonial scholars of education have long pointed out that silence within a field of inquiry is rarely a naturally occurring absence; it is rather a product of socially sanctioned discourses and practices that actively create and reproduce this silence.  When she published ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ over 35 years ago, Gayatri Spivak (1988) compellingly argued that colonialism’s material, epistemic, and relational violences are not reproduced because the subaltern cannot or does not speak against these violences.  Instead, these violences are reproduced because those of us who hold systemic power – including critical education scholars like myself located in the global North – refuse to actually hear and be moved by what the subaltern is saying.  Even when we claim to be listening, we often unconsciously edit out what is unfamiliar or inconvenient, most of all that which implicates us in the violence that produces the divide between the powerful and the subaltern in the first place.

This issue (39) of Policy and Practice offers a rich contribution to ongoing dialogues about how silences are reproduced and naturalised in global and development education, and how we might not only make this silencing visible but also expand our collective response-ability – that is, our ability to respond to what is being silenced – in more accountable ways.  The level of interest in these matters is evident in the significant number of article submissions received.  Yet, as I read through each of this issue’s thoughtful contributions on silences in education, I was reminded that, paradoxically, we also find ourselves in a moment of increasing cacophony, where polarised perspectives compete for platform and audience.  In one sense, ‘difficult knowledges’ continue to be ignored; in another sense, we are inhabiting an era of significant noise, rather than silence per se.  One way of thinking about this is as a characteristic of our wider context of ‘liquid modernity’, as theorised by Zygmunt Bauman (2000).

Silence in solid versus liquid modernity

Liquid modernity is characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.  Compared to the ‘solid modernity’ that preceded it, in liquid modernity established institutions are unstable, intergenerational contracts are broken, information technologies change much faster than people can keep up or cope with, and the future is highly uncertain.  Thanks to social media, we are overwhelmed by a constant stream of (mis-/dis-) information and intense emotions that are nearly impossible to meaningfully process, metabolise, and make sense of.  It is, therefore, no surprise that many young people feel overwhelmed by grief, pain, anger, betrayal, and powerlessness, particularly when the immense suffering from wildfires, famines, and genocides being live-streamed to their smartphones is met with systemic indifference.

In our liquid context, there are also few compelling meta-narratives or stable epistemic authorities, and little possibility for enduring consensus, shared sensemaking, or even shared understandings of the meaning of a single word.  On the one hand, this makes it more difficult to sustain the ‘silences’ that were common in solid modernity, as there is more epistemic space for alternative perspectives.  However, liquid modernity has also fostered a condition in which everyone is encouraged to speak, and partly as a result, no one is listening to each other.  While cacophony might be understood as the opposite of silence, the overall impact may be similar.

It is important to note that both solid and liquid modernity rest on a basic foundation of systemic colonial violence and unsustainability.  This includes the extractive violence of global capital, the political violence of the nation-state, the epistemic violence of supposedly universal (Eurocentric) reason, and most foundationally, the relational violence of separating humans from nature, which has led to the naturalisation and normalisation of hierarchies and separations between species, human cultures, and knowledge systems (Stein et al., 2017).  Yet despite a plethora of critical scholarship documenting these realities, modernity’s constitutive social and ecological violences continue to be systemically denied.  Thus, while ‘speaking truth to power’ about this violence remains necessary, it is likely insufficient for the tasks of interrupting it and healing its enduring impacts.  It is in this context that we see the waning relevance of the educational frames crafted in and for a different era, which includes not only mainstream educational frames but also the critical educational frames that many of us hold dear.