Chairs: Barbara Schulte (University of Vienna, Austria) & Philip Knobloch (Technical University Dortmund, Germany)
Human learning is universal. However, conceptions, forms, and practices of learning have developed along various paths that have been shaped by both shared and divided, consensual and conflictual histories of learning. The school, as an institutionalised epitome of mass education, has presently emerged as the most dominant and visible site of learning. This monopolisation and thereby reduction of potential shapes and practices of learning have profoundly impacted on our understanding of what learning is (or should be), including, for example, learning content, modes of inquiry, and relationships amongst learners (and teachers).
This Working Group calls for theoretical, methodological and/or empirical papers that direct their gaze beyond mainstreamed understandings and enactments of learning. We welcome contributions that seek to uncover and foreground those ideas and practices of learning that have been marginalised within school-based worlds of learning, both from contemporary and historical perspectives. Comparative papers are particularly welcome. Relevant questions include the following:
- What are the educational and pedagogical repercussions of alternative epistemologies of learning in historical retrospect or with regard to contemporary analyses?
- Which alternative educational histories exist and which can be reconstructed - from indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged groups?
- Which forms of alternative learning and education have been ignored, misinterpreted or marginalised in the past or to date?
- Which controversies have evolved around the discussions of alternative epistemologies of learning? Whose voices are given legitimacy, whose voices are silenced?
- What are potential implications of postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies for curriculum studies and theories?
- Which alternative pedagogies deal with alternative forms of learning?
- What is the relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, or dominant and counter-dominant forms of learning, forms of knowledge, and epistemologies?
- Which alternative forms of knowledge can be described? What role was, is, or should be ascribed to indigenous myths and/or religious epistemologies, for example? What is the significance of art and aesthetic learning experiences? What role does the body play? How does language frame and shape epistemologies and practices of learning?
- To what extent do alternative forms of learning represent a challenge for comparative studies? Which research methodologies and scientific theories are appropriate?