This book explores the complexity of communication and understanding as a possible asset in formal education rather than a problem that needs to be “fixed”. The authors examine the question and experience as pedagogical tools, challenging readers to play the critic and ask hard questions, beginning with: Why do the ideas discussed within the book matter? The digital information age with expanding ways of thinking, being, communicating, and learning complicates public education. So, what happens as diverse narratives collide in schools? To answer this question, the authors of this book delve into conflicting assumptions within the framework of complexity sciences and education in an attempt to explore space beyond positivist/anti-positivist debates. This involves examining the role of cultural and aesthetic narratives and cautionary tales as means of acknowledging possibilities in human experiences in education. These possibilities can facilitate praxis, as theory, research, and teaching become reflective practices, and as thinking about education broadens to include diverse methods of understanding and presenting complex phenomena.
This book explores the generative power of vulnerabilities facing individuals who inhabit educational spaces. We argue that vulnerability can be an asset in developing understandings of others, and in interrogating the self. Explorations of vulnerability offer a path to building empathy and creating engaged generosity within a community of dissensus. This kind of self-examination is essential in a selfie society in which democratic participation often devolves into neoliberal silos of discourse and marginalization of others who look, think, and believe differently. By vulnerability we mean the experiences that have the potential to compromise our livelihood, beliefs, values, emotional and mental states, sense of self-worth, and positioning within the Habermasian system/lifeworld as teachers and learners. We can refer to this as microvulnerability—that is, those things humans encounter in daily life that make us aware of the illusion of control. The selfie becomes an analogy for the posturing of a particular self that reinforces how one hopes to be understood by others. What are the vulnerabilities teachers and learners face? And how can we joker, as Norris calls it, the various vulnerabilities that we inherently bring into teaching and learning spaces? In light of the divisive discourses around the politics of Ferguson, Charlie Hebdo, ISIS, Ebola, Surveillance, and Immigration; vulnerability offers an entry way into exhuming the humanity necessary for a participatory democracy that is often hijacked by a selfie mentality.
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