This year I have had the absolute pleasure to be heavily involved in the running of a 'new' course for the MSc Social Justice and Community Action, of which I am the programme director. The course has been on-the-books since the inception of the programme, but, so I'm told, it has never run for a variety of reasons. The course is called Learning for Democracy and it has been an absolute joy to run, even in the middle of intense industrial action. In fact, being locked into a period of upheaval like this has, arguably, augmented the content of the course and made it even more relevant.
At its heart, the course is about the paradoxes inherent within liberal democracy and how different models of democracy all - implicitly or explicitly - attempt to reconcile such paradoxes to make democracy more relevant to the demos. It also examines the recent crises in neoliberalism and capitalism, and challenges its students to ask the question: are we currently going through a crisis of democracy. And, if so, what can / should be done about it? The students have a plethora of models and tools at their disposal, and they need to consider, as informal or formal educators, what are the 'best' ways to respond to such crises with different learning groups?
Co-organising this course in the middle of intense industrial action has been a very educational process for me. The typical recording of asynchronous lecture format had to be radically re-thought as industrial action has left us very little time between lectures to actually do the preparation for the next one - all of this course is new content and material and any academic will tell you this can be extraordinarily time consuming. So, about three weeks in we realised we had to do something different or we wouldn't be able to deliver a substantive amount of this course. We started lectures as dialogues, between two of the teaching team each week. I've been involved in every dialogue since they began and not only have I found it a great way to teach, but the 'bouncing' ideas off each other during recording has really provoked some stimulating discussions about very important issues we are all going through, whether we recognise these or not.
What has been equally exciting is the students working together to produce learning for democracy projects, each to tackle issues that are important to the groups they work with IRL or prospective groups they want to work with. This has led to some very rich discussions about issues that groups are facing all over the globe and the barriers that our students face implementing projects such as these. What has been discussed at length is a growing preference across some parts of the globe of 'removing' politics from education and the powers-that-be creating increasing sanctions for teachers / facilitators who don't. This has provoked some interesting discussions about if this is contributing to what Chantal Mouffe calls 'a populist moment' and, even more worryingly, leaving citizens unprepared for the lure of populism and/or authoritarianism?
All involved in the course have been struggling for years to find the 'right' way forward for politics. Charges of corruption are espoused in most parts of the world and there is a admission that democracy has suffered from the expansion of capitalism, neoliberalism and globalisation which leaves politics increasingly vulnerable to market interference and, potentially, domination. Within such processes, it becomes more difficult to separate political ideologies or even recognise when political parties and/or political leaders are espousing contradictory or pick-n-mix ones that can - and do - have disastrous consequences for citizens across the globe. Within such an 'interregnum' or populist moment it surely makes more sense for educational processes to engage more with political education rather than less.
But, less overt engagement means that politics is still being transmitted, but in taken-for-granted ways which are treated as 'normal' and part of the 'natural order'. This is torturous, where people 'know' that the systems they are embedded within are unfair but they lack necessary toolkits to be able to evaluate and analyse these systems in a systematic way. It's not easy to do this and there are debates galore about what is the appropriate role of the educator, how much knowledge they should 'transmit' and how much to enable students to develop their own toolkits, even though they may be problematic. There are other debates as well, around partisanship and around what models you can use in educational spaces to enable debate and difference, and whether it is the best outcome to come to a consensus or not. Nevertheless, it really is encouraging to be able to have these conversations and hear about the great work that is being done around the world, despite shrinking spaces for this type of work to flourish.
The optimist in me hopes we are moving towards a paradigm shift, a shift where a new or existing model of democracy - or something very much like democracy - materialises to get us out of this interregnum or populist moment. Like Zizek, I don't think populism is the answer. It requires the political - and politics - to be excessively simplified to build questionable alliances that benefit some groups more than others. We need more political education, not less, and in a critical way. There are no easy answers but, in many ways, this is exciting. A new horizon is waiting to be seen and embraced, somewhere just out of sight. I need to keep focused on that and keep questioning or I would become increasingly pessimistic as authoritarianism incessantly creeps. I'm in the right place to do that though, surrounded by great people. There is a lot, for which, to be thankful.
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