MLE Podcast Season 2 Episode 6

“Learning Laterally: Unsettling the Normative Gestures of Pedagogy” with Erin Manning and Joëlle Aden

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“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” 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 calls 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? 

In the end, it was a conversation about so much more than teaching and learning, but about “amplifying the question of pedagogy itself” (EM), and about how to be together in a “tender, caring, and careful” way. “We owe each other everything,” Erin reminded us at the end, citing Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and I don’t think we could have come up with a more apt description of the actual experience of learning.