The Avant

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The Avant is based on ongoing conversations, and conversation, to my mind, is the soul of culture.

Fergal Gaynor

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Technology and Experience: revisiting Ivan Illich's tools for conviviality

Throughout the pandemic, scholars, administrators, and developers have been asking: which tools and practices from emergency education during the coronavirus pandemic may become part of established practice? Related to this question is how scholars have responded to the present event by turning to past pedagogies to inform current practices. I focus on the tools for conviviality initiated by Ivan Illich in  Deschooling Society  (1970); defined by Illich in  Tools for Conviviality  (1973); and refined by Illich in  Medical Nemesis  (1975). There is renewed interest in Illich as part of contemporary discussions of emancipatory education.  I historicise Illich’s tools for conviviality to make the point that remote learning and homeschooling during the pandemic has brought marginal pedagogies into mainstream focus. I divide this post into three parts: first, a brief explanation of Illich’s core idea of tools for conviviality using  Deschooling Society...
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A matter of conviviality: a note on the "Big Tent" metaphor in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)

Image
  Big Tent Debate in SoTL Center for Engaged Learning  Elon University, North Carolina, 18 September 2013. The “big tent” metaphor has thus far characterised much of SoTL’s thinking about its inherent diversity. Huber and Hutchings (2005) identify the “teaching commons,” as the process of coming together to encourage discourse within and outside of our disciplines about how we teach and how students learn. These Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching colleagues encourage scholars to make their inquiries not private but communal enterprises that cultivate discipline-specific methodologies in an ongoing pursuit of deepening our understanding of teaching and learning. They urge us to create a “big tent” for SoTL (Huber & Hutchings, 2005, p. 30).  Mary Huber & Pat Hutchings with Tony Ciccone (2011, p. 9) clarified the "big tent" debate in SoTL as based on a distinction made between advocates of constructionism . Constructionist learning is the creation by...
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Education versus “learnification” what’s at stake?

Will the effects of pandemic pedagogy accelerate learnification?  Gert Biesta ,  Dutch-born education philosopher  who is associated with the reclaiming teaching movement,  highlights that the discourse of “education” has become disconnected from “learning.” This shift began during the 1980s, accelerated as a consequence of the proliferation of educational technology over the past twenty years, and is likely to increase with data-gathering and extended reality becoming ubiquitous within educational systems. Biesta makes the point that language constructs reality and that the language of learning has privileged process , but has excluded questions of purpose and content and relationships within dynamic human interrelationships that should define teaching and learning (Biesta, 2012). The sole concern of learnification becomes the individualistic process of learning, rather than the purpose , context , and relationships that are central to education as both a ...
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