Where next for pedagogy? Critical agency in educational futures

Thesis URL

http://research.usc.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/usc:4521

Marcus’ thesis approaches education through the context of agency – asking how can we increase people capacity to respond to life? It employs a critical futures thinking approach and builds on the powerful futures method CLA: Causal Layered Analysis. The thesis suggests that we can rethink curricula and institutional practice through a deep engagement with this method and to further this offers CLP: Causal Layered Pedagogy as a model for such emancipatory activity. Marcus concludes by suggesting the possibility of a Critical Renaissance in education.

Abstract

Critical agency in educational futures can be rethought through a layered and reflexive futures praxis. Rather than approach agency via social theory or philosophy a futures lens is developed that involves three broad strands. Firstly, a form of futures thinking is presented that is characterized, following Ashis Nandy’s works, as shamanic. Secondly, critical agency is explored in the work of ten theorists who represent a range of possible understandings of agency that move along a continuum that includes Marxist critical theory, poststructural deconstruction and normative accounts of critical agency drawing on the Christian, Vedantic and Tantric traditions. Thirdly, Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is developed through a dialogue with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari whose concept of the rhizome provides the conceptual tool to better understand its potential.

Shamanic futures thinking is developed to enable an engagement with critical agency that moves it beyond a dialectical agency-structure construction of the problem. Six shamanic futures concepts are introduced to underpin this approach. They supply reference points for negotiating the futures terrain and enabling an understanding of agency that accounts for both subjective and structural process. This twofold objective is important when educational outcomes are sought.

Education, as a structural expression of social process, requires a structural hermeneutic yet agency, which lies, by definition, beyond structure – or at least dialectically defined vis-à-vis structure – requires a poststructural and postmaterial invitation to any conversation about its role within educational process. Thus a poetics of the Critical is developed and applied in order to rethink the current deadlock between the educational system and those it is designed to assist. Such a poetics of the critical presents a set of critical opportunities for educative and curricula engagement with libratory process.

CLA and the Rhizome