Session Information
13 SES 14 B JS, Public pedagogy and sustainability challenges JS Part 1
Joint Symposium NW 13 and NW 30 to be continued in 13 SES 16 B JS
Contribution
This paper contributes to a recent development in ESD literature: the search for a navigational approach to ESE practices (Decuypere et al., 2019; Latour, 2018). The focus of this approach is neither instrumental (focused on problem-solving) nor emancipatory (focused on individual transformation) but on the situated attachments people maintain to a particular milieu (Stengers, 2005) while taking care for a specific, designated place (a shoreline, a brownfield, a park etc.). In this paper, we will elaborate on one particular case, an urban gardening project in the city of Ghent and demonstrate how this navigational approach articulates the outspoken public and educational dynamic of this initiative. This also means that our analysis will show how this urban gardening initiative is more than a social cohesion project, also more than a knowledge creation process of citizens and also different from political activism. Learning to navigate in this project points at a triple capacity: becoming sensitive to the heterogeneity of human and non-human entanglements in this particular place (e.g. how the seedlings connect to the very different cultures present in this neighbourhood); becoming able to slow down one’s habits of orientation (e.g. refugees learn to speak Dutch in many ways, not only by attending a language course) and engaging oneself to formulate propositions about the kind of practices this particular place needs in order to thrive and prosper (e.g. let’s try to earn our living by taking care for the surrounding of this neighborhood). In order to scrutinize the kind of interventions that are vital for this ‘learning to navigate’ in this urban gardening project, we introduce the concept of a tactical pedagogy. This pedagogy installs a tactical logic which is different from claiming a proper place and also different from a focus on capitalizing benefits for the future (de Certeau, 1984). A tactical pedagogy fosters educational temporalities (as rhythms that slow the present) and a learning as a situated activity that takes place through belonging. It is a pedagogy that is attentive for how in the course of mundane activities (such as cooking, walking and in our case gardening) issues arise that concern both human and nonhuman actors, and that acquire a very concrete sense (e.g. how the climate has an impact on the growth of the seedlings on this particular plot of land; who can join this project based on which criteria) as opposed to generality or universality.
References
De Certeau, M. The practice of everyday life; trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984 Latour, B. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime; Polity: Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA, USA, 2018. Decuypere, M.; Hoet, H.; Vandenabeele, J. Learning to Navigate (in) the Anthropocene. Sustainability 2019, 11(2), 547; doi: 10.3390/su11020547 Stengers, I. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism; Open Humanities Press: London, UK, 2015
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