Module 1: Unlearning and Unsettling: Questioning and Reflecting
Module 1: Unlearning and Unsettling: Questioning and Reflecting
Figure 1: Unlearning and Unsettling Trailer
Alternative versions:
Click here for a version with ASL
Click here for a version with LSQ (coming soon!)
Story
Objective: To examine and unlearn individual, institutional, and societal maladaptive assumptions and conventions that block designing learning for human diversity, variability, and equity and global complexity.
Our education system has been designed to treat everyone the same: equality over equity, often under the guise of fairness. It serves, often overtly, as a gatekeeping system that ensures that the students who graduate out of the system have the same core set of skills, knowledge, aptitudes and practices. We have a system that is often designed to ensure sameness within a student body that is unique and for a world that is complex and messy.
Using a liberating structure, post-secondary educators reflected on what it means to unlearn and unsettle our current education model.
Origins in Years of Unlearning (Jutta’s story)
The following is a telling from two decades of experiments with unlearning in the university classroom. The area of study is inclusive design, but the assumptions that are tackled go beyond the area of study. This experience, and the community that supported it, motivated this project for me.
The field and practice focused on inclusion and equity (that I grew with my team and community), holds two things to be true: we need diversity to survive and thrive and the world and our lives are increasingly complex, entangled, and changing. What follows from these truths is that learning must be lifelong and adaptive, learner difference is a strength and should be nourished, and an important skill is collaboration across difference. The formalized education system we were part of seemed to explicitly and implicitly deny and/or reduce these truths. Signs of this denial could be found in the conventional vocabulary of the academy, which included “terminal” degree completion, disciplinary domains and rigour, standards compliance, and student ranking. Proof of independent production was mandatory, and collaboration was suspected as cheating. This was asserted despite the assignment of redundantly performed exercises that had no value beyond the classroom, within a cohort and across years of cohorts. Disciplines were explicitly and implicitly defended through insider language, insider rituals, and tacit hierarchies, thereby discouraging collaboration across disciplines or incursions by peerless upstarts. The practice in the academy seemed to be to make it harder for students to be admitted, participate, and learn, so only those who could conform would survive. The challenge for students seemed to be to compete to climb an ever-steeper hierarchy. The research pinnacle to be attained depended on statistical significance, isolated conditions, and replication across contexts, assuming homogeneity that could only be achieved b