[PeDAGoG] [GTA] WEAVING ALTERNATIVES #08: A periodical of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives- Transformative learning and education

[Shrishtee Bajpai]

Dear all,
This latest periodical by GTA on Transformative learning and emancipatory
education (in english) is out now. We will share the Spanish version soon.
Take a look and share across your networks

Warm regards







WEAVING ALTERNATIVES #08:
A periodical of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives

*TRANSFORMATIVE ALTERNATIVES ON LEARNING AND EMANCIPATORY EDUCATION*

*The contents of this periodical are also available online on this webpage
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:index>.*

Editorial

Dear readers,

It is our pleasure to share Global Tapestry of Alternative's eighth
periodical with you. The Global Tapestry of Alternatives seeks to build
bridges between networks of Alternatives around the globe and promote the
creation of new processes of confluence. You can learn more about the
project, in our introductory note
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/introduction>.

Learning has a central role in the construction of the world and the
subjectivities that inhabit it. The relational condition of human beings
means that when their social relationships change, their world and they
themselves are transformed. Pedagogies not only shape human reason but also
build our sensibility and desire. Learning processes not only have a
central role in the reproduction of relations of domination, but also in
the processes of liberation.

This is why the current civilizational crisis we are going through (a
crisis that is manifested in political, health, economic, and environmental
crises) cannot be understood without calling into question the dominant
educational model. This model is also the cause and the result of a
colonial, capitalist and patriarchal system, where it is assumed that there
is only one way of knowing, thus conceiving knowledge as an exclusive
property of western civilization (coloniality of knowledge); it is presumed
that there are a series of experts who possess the knowledge and are called
upon to teach those who are in a condition of ignorance; pedagogies are
disconnected from the potentialities and needs of the territory where it is
taught. Thus giving rise to a universalist and abstract knowledge; and
pedagogies that exclude nature, for it is assumed that Earth is an entity
from which there would not be much to learn.

However, social movements and countless peoples from diverse geographies
have been able to re-create and propose alternative conceptions of
education, learning and pedagogies. They are transforming colonized
subjectivities, giving place to a world that re-weaves the tapestry of life.

With the aim of showing that, if we want to solve the crisis we are in, it
is necessary to transform hegemonic education by learning from existing and
successful processes. Through this periodical, we will focus on processes
from different geographies that have been weaving decolonial,
anti-patriarchal, biocentric, just and anti-capitalist alternatives. What
elements do we find in common among these initiatives? What can we learn
from them?

The process of curating this periodical is centred on collaboration,
diversity and emergence with the aim to better understand the variety of
work happening within the network.

This piece features articles by Yuvan Aves who writes about children’s
engagement in creating awareness about the challenges faced by coastlines
in Chennai (India), Dan Baron who summaries the process of transformance
between the Rivers Tocantins and Itacaiúnas with the help of 8 eloquent
poems, a brief essay on the processes of learning and education in the
Misak University by James Montano, Lucy Elena and Fabio Calambás. Carol
Anne, Gary Anderson, Dipti Desai, and Ana Inés Heras talk about the concept
of “third spaces” which explore issues of domination, power, and
emancipation. Angging Aban sheds light on the central role of communities
in developing emancipatory pedagogies with the help of 4 initiatives in
Southeast Asia and last but not least, a summary of a wonderful
time-sharing exercise Pallavi Sharma and Melanie Bush conducted with their
students. Additionally, it also comprises updates from our weavers in India
(Vikalp Sangam) and Mexico and Colombia (Crianza Mutua) and a few of our
endorsers, Anitra Nelson, Crystal Arnold, Vivianne Solace and The
Alternatives Project.

The periodical is put together by Shrishtee Bajpai, Lina Alvarez, Franco
Augusto and Urvi Shah. We are happy to have you read this issue and share
and reflect along with us.


Updates from the GTA

*GTA Webinars:*

The aim of GTA webinars is to collaborate and bring out new ideas from
within the network to anchor discussions on radical transformative
practices. Recently, “Beyond Money: A Post Capitalist Strategy” a webinar
series by Anitra Nelson, David Barkin, a Mexican economist, and Meenakshi
Gupta, an Indian social entrepreneur discussing money could be replaced as
the organizing principle of society allowing the fabrication of a world
without socio-economic inequality and crippling environmental stresses was
curated. The recordings can be found here
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:events:2022_beyondmoney>
 We are now looking at putting together dialogue from the weaver's, Vikalp
Sangam, Crianzas Mutuas Mexico, and Crianzas Mutauas Colombia on healing.

*GTA Assembly:*

The GTA Assembly is held every 3 months to introduce new members, follow up
on updates and discuss upcoming plans. The 4th GTA Assembly took place on
the 30th of June 2022. You can find the recording and report here
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:assembly:2022_06_30>.
The 5th Assembly will be held at September end.

*GTA Mapping:*

GTA Mapping is a process to chart out all endorsers and weavers in a
digital web space according to their geographical locations, while also
making the process participatory. Next in action is to get endorsers on
board to use the web space for updates and information management.

*PeDAGoG:*

PeDAGoG <https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:pedagog>
(Post-Development
Academic-Activist Global Group) is a global network of academics and
academic activists interested in post-development, radical alternatives,
and related themes. Currently, we are hosting a webinar series on learning
alternatives. Two webinars by Pallavi Varma on living utopias, and Dan
Baron on the rivers of meeting project are completed. An upcoming webinar
by Mauricio, Wendy and Juan on Unitierra’s processes is scheduled for the
8th of July.

*Participation in the World Social Forum:*

In an effort to build solidarity and connect to movements working for
change, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives once again had an active
presence at the World Social Forum in 2022. This year the WSF took place
both in-person in Mexico City and online from 01-06 May 2022. GTA organised
and participated in various activities in-person in Mexico and online. At
most of the events, language translation was offered. Six members of the
GTA core group were able to travel to Mexico to participate in the WSF in
person.

GTA sessions included: (1) Staying human at the global level on the
experiences of remaining grounded in the local while working
transnationally; Grounded voices: Toward radical democracy with experiences
shared from India, Mexico, Scotland and Rojave ; (3) Knowledge and the
production of learning for emancipatory practice on critical pedagogies;
and (4) Radical transformative alternatives where GTA weavers from
Colombia, India and Mexico shared their experiences. In addition, GTA
supported endorsers May First Technology with their session on “A timeline
from movement technologies to liberation” and MINGAnet with a session on
Latin American fabric towards the social and economic transformations
required for the care of life. All of the activities were carried out in
collaboration with partners in Adelante
<https://adelante.global/doku.php?id=about>: a dialogue of global processes
which GTA has been facilitating. Most significant was two assemblies which
GTA organized on Convergence of Radical Alternatives. With over 100
participants in the online and in-person events, we were able to share a
manifesto <https://adelante.global/doku.php?id=events:wsf2022> for radical
change. This manifesto was also presented at the closing Agora of the World
Social Forum and at the Stockholm+50 People’s Summit in June 2022.

For the past two decades, the World Social Forum (WSF) has served as an
open meeting place for social movements, networks, NGOs and other civil
society organizations who are aiming to build alternatives to the dominant
and destructive world system. While there was limited participation in the
forum in person this year for many reasons, participation in the event was
important for solidarity building and re-connection after the COVID-19
pandemic.



Updates from our Weavers

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives is a “network of networks”. Each of
those networks acts in different parts of the planet by identifying and
connecting Alternatives. They are the Weavers. The following are the
networks that currently weaves the GTA. In the following section, our
Weavers from India, Colombia and Mexico shares updates from their recent
activities and actions.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:weavers>*


* <https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:05:frederic>*
Updates from our Endorsers
The Alternatives Project

The Alternatives Project <https://www.thealternativesproject.org/> – known
by its initials as TAP – is an international and geographically diverse
network of progressive academics, union members, civil society activists,
and social movement participants concerned with building a global
collective critical voice-oriented towards transformative education and
societal change. At the moment we have about 25 core members, hundreds of
people have signed our Statement (including Noam Chomsky, please sign!) and
attended some of our activities, and TAP is in our second year of operation.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:tap>*



Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy

*By Anitra Nelson*

Mainstream education is oriented to training students in every way for a
future role in capitalist workplaces. Transformative learning and
emancipatory education are significant alternatives for skilling ourselves
to create and experiment with postcapitalist futures. Many activist
scholars inhabit such spaces. My recent work Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist
Strategy <https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340111/beyond-money/> (2022) is
a case in point.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:anitra>*



Offers and Needs Market

*by Crystal Arnold, Education director at the Post Growth Institute*

You're invited to join an open to all and hosted by the Post Growth
Institute!

This is a two-hour guided process in which community members meet to
identify and exchange their passions, knowledge, skills, resources,
opportunities, and needs.

It’s a fun and effective way to connect, get more comfortable expressing
your offers and needs, and begin conversations with interesting people.

You can register for free here: https://www.offersandneeds.com/monthly

*An educator’s notes from an eroding coast*

*by Yuvan Aves*

Yuvan, a naturalist, award-winning writer, educator and activist based in
Chennai; share with us his trip notes where he explores different
alternative initiatives.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:yuvan>*


Creating Third Spaces of Learning for Post-Capitalism: Lessons from
Educators and activists

*by Gary Anderson, Dipti Desai, Ana Inés Heras and Carol Anne Spreen*

Spaces that prefigure a post-capitalist world are all around us if we know
where to look. In this article, we seek to explore counter-hegemonic social
spaces, or what some call third spaces (Anzaldua, 1987/2021; Bhabha,
1994/2002; Soja, 1996) that have been created largely by social, community
and artistic activists prefigure a post-capitalist, multi-racial democracy.
These spaces tend to be democratic, grounded in communities and challenge
the hegemony of current forms of economic, political, cultural, and
educational domination.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:learnpostcapitalism>*

Presentation of the Ala kusreik ya- Misak University

*by James Montano Morales, Lucy Elena Tunubalá Tombé and Fabio Calambás
Paja*

The Ala kusreik ya - Misak University is an integral, autonomous
educational process that seeks to revitalize the pishindθ waramik or “good
Misak living”, promoting education based on four spirals and four axes.
While the spirals of knowledge are: mθrθp (listening), aship (seeing), isup
(thinking) and marθp (doing), the pillars are autonomous economy,
autonomous administration, socio-political organization, and major law
(derecho mayor). This educational process was born in the month of December
2010 as a response to the need of the community to reinforce the learning
processes from intra-cultural foundations (or from autonomous education),
as well as from the construction of a dialogue of knowledges
(interculturality), and from those transcultural and global foundations
that affect us as human beings.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:misak>*



"Collaboration across borders": comic and interview

*by Pallavi Sharma and Melanie Bush*

This is a snippet from an interview by Urvi Shah
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/urvishxh/> with Melanie Bush, professor at
Delphi University and Pallavi Varma, Professor at Azim Premji University on
learning and sharing as educators. We’ve attempted to present their
experience of collaboration through a graphical comic. Magna
<magnaycielo at sinescuela.org>, an 11-year-old artist from Argentina, has put
a lot of her thought into bringing this story come to life.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:collaboration>*


Transformance between the Rivers Tocantins and Itacaiúnas

*by Dan Baron*

After 10 years of collaborations with the MST (Landless Workers), Trades
Union and indigenous movements, and the Pará State Federal University
(UFPA), in Brasil, performance educators and eco-cultural activists Dan
Baron and his co-founder of the Community University of the Rivers, Manoela
Souza, were invited to create a community sculpture in the Afro-Indigenous
village of Cabelo Seco in 2008, an arrow of land where the River Tocantins
and River Itacaiúnas meet.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:rivers>*


Exploring alternative schools in Southeast Asia

*by Ananeza P. Aban*

Marginalized communities and their ability to organize themselves towards a
common goal would attest that even amid multiple crises, they can cultivate
notable practices that produce and reproduce transformative pedagogies,
especially for the young generation of learners.

These four (4) cases from Southeast Asia provide a material foundation for
dynamic learning processes that amplify the central role of communities in
developing emancipatory pedagogies attuned to their situation, context,
culture, histories, and capacities. Their ground-based undertakings dare to
challenge the mainstream educational paradigm extremely influenced by
market and capital. These cases question where knowledge is truly
generated, and how far have communities been recognized as the producers
and builders of knowledge.

*Keep reading ->
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:08:schools>*


Book review: Convivial Futures, Views from a Post-Growth Tomorrow

“Talking about a future – don’t stain it with any Utopia, terrorising the
necessary complexity.”

Nora Bateson, 2021

“There is no such thing as a convivial future. A convivial future is an
oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Conviviality is not about linearity and
progress, not about planning and designing a better world for the day after
tomorrow; not about aiming at an allegedly better future at the expense of
a good here and now; not about drafting blueprints for ideal societies that
could be applied in any given context, at any given time, at any given
place. On the contrary, conviviality refers to a specific kind of lived
togetherness that is shared between all the human and non-human inhabitants
of a specific place in time: not anywhere, anytime—but right here, right
now!”

Andrea Vetter and Matthias Fersterer, *‘Right Here, Right Now The Art of
Living Together’* in Adloff and Caillé (eds), 2022

Convivial Futures starts with bold premises. The introduction by the book’s
editors, the German sociology professor Frank Adloff and the French
professor emeritus Alain Caillé, states that “To be a pioneering, public
political philosophy, convivialism must succeed in capturing the signs of
the times and developing perspectives for the future. As difficult as it is
to formulate such positive outlooks, that is precisely what this volume is
all about.” (p 9) and also that “Convivialism presents itself as a
political philosophy destined to follow in the footsteps of the great
ideologies of modernity—liberalism, socialism, anarchism, communism. These
ideologies are no longer able to enlighten us on either the present state
of the world or what it could or should look like tomorrow, if only because
they have completely failed to anticipate the environmental crisis and
global warming.” (pp 14-15)

Unusually, and to its credit, Convivial Futures then provides space for
those who disagree with the premises of its editors, and some of the
contents of the Second Convivialist Manifesto, which is the current
expression of convivialist philosophy. Some of the critique comes from
fellow academics (Robert van Krieken and Martin Krygier, ‘Is Convivialism
the Answer? Depends on the Question’) and some from non-academics (Andrea
Vetter and Matthias Fersterer, ‘Right Here, Right Now The Art of Living
Together’). At a slight tangent – but a useful one – Federico Demaria and
Ashish Kothari provides a good outline of current notions of ‘development’
and what the alternatives are and might be in ‘The Post-Development Agenda
Paths to a Pluriverse of Convivial Futures.’

So the book is a mixed bag, with some contributors outlining and advocating
hypothetical future re-designs of economic, social and ecological
institutions, systems and practices which would be better than the current
awful system, while others provide information on what is actually
happening now which could be described as convivial. Sometimes both in one
chapter.

If you are new to learning what’s wrong with the current world system, and
are interested in ideas on how it could be improved, then Convivial Futures
would be a good place to start. If you feel you know more than enough about
what’s wrong, are sceptical about attempts to imagine ‘solutions’ which
“terrorise the necessary complexity”, and agree with Ivan Illich (as cited
by Vetter and Fersterer, p 165) that what is convivial tends to be
place-centred and vernacular (and hence happening here and now – wherever
your here and now may be) then probably what you are looking for is a book
on convivial presents. I know I am. Here’s hoping it turns up soon.

The book is available as Open Access in the editorial website
<https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-5664-0/convivial-futures/?c=410000045>
.
------------------------------

*About the author of this review*: Christine Dann is a New Zealand writer
and eco-gardener who has been active in feminist, peace and green movements
since the 1970s. This has led to her developing an 'alternatives' world
view which is now informed by degrowth, decolonial and indigenous
perspectives. She is a member of the GTA Core team.


*Thank you for reading!*
*Global Tapestry of Alternatives*
*contact at globaltapestryofalternatives.org
<contact at globaltapestryofalternatives.org>*

To subscribe and get our updates, visit this link
<https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/contact>

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