Willed Forgetfulness: The Arts, Education and the Case for Unlearning

Baldacchino, John

doi:10.1007/s11217-012-9339-y

Cited by 19 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Hansen et al, 2015); (iii) in early years education, as a way of exploring the fragmentation of the field (Bown & Sumsion, 2016) and addressing the gap between theory and practice (Moss, 2007); and finally (iv) in arts education (e.g. Baldacchino, 2013), as well as other educational literature (such as, Ljunggren, 2010), as an element of critical pedagogy and transformative learning.…”

Section: How Is Agonism Used In Educational Research?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Agonism in education: a systematic scoping review and discussion of its educational potential

et al. 2021

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Within political philosophy and particularly in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, "agonism" has been described as representing the notion of being able to challenge and dissent in a productive way. However, little is known about how agonism is used in the educational literature, other than some applications relevant to democratic education. This paper considers the use of agonism in the educational literature drawing on the findings of a systematic scoping review exploring how it has been used in the context of education. Five databases were searched for literature published using agonism within the context of education to map the existing body of work in a systematic fashion, and to explore how agonism has been differently conceptualised and utilised by researchers in the field of education. The findings suggest that there have been a range of attempts to apply agonistic principles in different educational sub-fields (including, citizenship education, early years education, initial teacher training, arts education and international education), and different interpretations of such principles into education based on different philosophical underpinnings (dissociative and associative approaches). As agonism is mostly explored in a theoretical way, we also discuss the potential of abstract theoretical agonistic principles from different philosophical traditions to be translated into meaningful practical applications for education in order to inform curriculum development, infuse democratic principles into classroom practice, and help to negotiate deep-running tensions amongst key stakeholders in education.

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Section: How Is Agonism Used In Educational Research?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Agonism in education: a systematic scoping review and discussion of its educational potential

et al. 2021

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“…Some problems of this are revealed if we adapt to the present discussion Baldacchino’s following words of caution: ‘the case for unlearning’ should not be ‘a case for rejecting what we have been taught. Nor is it a simple act of rejecting bad habits to learn new virtues, which, when turned once more into bad habits, would need to be replaced by something else’ (Baldacchino, 2013: 427). There is in this cycle a developmentalist logic, one that we may extrapolate from Baldacchino’s (p. 427) objection ‘to a process of choosing, selecting, evaluating, rejecting and learning anew’ as a panacea, that reproduces, we think, the politics of uncritical normativization of slogans and labels.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On learning and unlearning

Papastephanou

Drousioti²

2023

Policy Futures in Education

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The concept of learning has obtained great popularity in many fields. In common cause with neo-liberal ideology, learning has led to a learnification process that turns social pathologies into individual deficits. Various ways out of this situation have been sought; chief among them is the recruitment of unlearning as a promising negation of learning and of its politics. Educational-philosophical, sociological, decolonial, as well as organizational and policy discourses valorize unlearning for different and often opposing reasons. However, as this article shows, unlearning has already been co-opted and utilized by learning discourses to advance the neo-liberal conception of learning. A further reaction to this usurpation of unlearning has been a tendency to premodify unlearning as ‘critical’ or ‘deep’. The present article critiques these conceptualizations and operationalizations of unlearning and argues for a more complex outlook on learning and unlearning than that which is currently predominant.

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“…By challenging every single assumption that is held constant-such as that of learning and development through art and education-I find strength in Garoian's proposal. It may well be that this is not what Garoian wants or intends, and I am sure he would probably object to my insistence that there is no solace to be found in learning per se (see Baldacchino, 2013b;2014). Yet, far from being dystopian, I would argue that this is what we have and we cannot assume that we can have anything else, although this does not mean that we have lost the ability to transcend the here and now.…”

Section: Impassementioning

confidence: 96%

“…It may well be that this is not what Garoian wants or intends, and I am sure he would probably object to my insistence that there is no solace to be found in learning per se (See Baldacchino, 2013a and2014). Yet far from being dystopian, I…”

Section: Impassementioning

confidence: 98%

The Métier of Living

Baldacchino

2015

Qualitative Inquiry

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In art, what appears to be a condition for change is almost always strategically expedient. This is especially the case when one positions art and change within a prosthetic space. Charles Garoian lays claim to this strategy by posing prosthesis as the fourth dimension that follows a third synthetic stage that dialectically binds a thesis to its antithesis. Re-reading Garoian’s claims against the Soviet and Neo-Liberal renditions of Hegel’s theory of the dialectic, this article argues that such claims could reduce art’s space to a prosthetic synthesis that risks pedagogical and aesthetic ossification. Given the performative élan by which Garoian invests education, this appears paradoxical, especially in terms of the personal dimension by which he invests his art as a métier of living and surviving a history that is firmly marked by the devastation of genocide. Strangely, this paradox is what gives us the ability and power by which we could seek a counter- Bildung. As this article’s author puts it, in art, such a counter- Bildung takes the form of unlearning by which one would exit the predicament of instrumental reason. For unlearning to become possible, prosthetic syntheses must be reversed by making of arts education a case for synthetic prostheses. Only then could Garoian’s performative method begin to assert an inverse positioning that would effectively counter the instrumentalization of the dialectic, and with it, that of history and art.

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Willed Forgetfulness: The Arts, Education and the Case for Unlearning

Cited by 19 publications

References 3 publications

Agonism in education: a systematic scoping review and discussion of its educational potential

Agonism in education: a systematic scoping review and discussion of its educational potential

On learning and unlearning

The Métier of Living

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