“Transversal operations for the creation of ways of knowing emerge from the ground up. They are singular and speculative at once, emboldened by the creativity of the everyday. The mistake is to assume that what education needs is a model. What education needs is an opening for learning, an operative interstice for seeing beyond the map.” –Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.

This was a conversation that felt like many different fingers pointing to the same moon — whether we call it “engaged pedagogy,” “transversality,” “enabling constraints,” “situations of encounter” or “rich learning contexts,” Prof Erin Manning and Prof Emeritus Joëlle Aden brought us into contact with their radical approaches to pedagogy, within two very different cultural, educational contexts. Rather than asking the question of how to teach and learn better, we took a few steps back to first consider the conditions that either facilitate or thwart our natural curiosity and inclination to pose “proto-philosophical questions,” as Erin Manning put it. 

The conversation traveled through a wide landscape of interlocking questions, beginning with the following question that undergirded the entire exchange: How might we talk about teaching and learning beyond the concepts we have about them? And then, more specifically: 

• How do institutions frame what it means to value knowledge? Is there a margin for evaluating learners differently, valuing process over product? 
• How can we get over the habit of simply applying theories and concepts in the classroom, and instead generate theories and concepts from experience? 
• How can we create a context in which thinking can be its most precise and generative? 
• Is there a way of languaging together that doesn’t suppose a pre-given meaning in encounters of learning? 
• How do we write new narratives for an ecological-relational approach, which disrupt the currently prevailing narratives of whiteness, coloniality, and neurotypicality? 
• How can we think with complexity as a society, rather than resisting it, and learn to engage systemically with change? 

To find out more about our guests: Joëlle Aden & Erin Manning. 

Additional references:

• Hélène Trocmé-Fabre, L’Arbre du savoir-apprendre. The art of learning and the knowledge tree. Editions Le manuscrit, 2022 (édition bilingue). We’ve just learned that Hélène Trocmé-Fabre has passed away and we would like to dedicate this episode to her work, which profoundly influenced the work of Joëlle Aden. 
• Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making,” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.

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