[SSC] A Practice that Aspires

[Laurence Davis]

Well said. I particularly like the emphasis on re-imagining and recreating the worlds in which we live as ‘an ongoing process of learning to be otherwise’. This does not seem to me at all ‘wildly utopian’ (6), but rather pragmatically utopian, in keeping with John Dewey’s understanding of ends as ‘foreseen consequences which arise in the course of activity and which are employed to give activity added meaning and to direct its further course’ (J. Dewey, ‘The Nature of Aims’, in R.D. Archambault ed., *John Dewey on Education'*, Random House, 1965, 72) and the authors’ commitment to an open-ended, democratic pedagogy guided by the grounded utopian philosophy of ‘walking, we ask questions’ (a topic, by the way, explored by a number of speakers at a recent Fringe Festival event in Dublin to which I contributed: https://soundcloud.com/sorcha-kenny/walking-we-ask-questions-part). As Paul Goodman once thoughtfully remarked of utopianism, in a world in which ‘experts plan in terms of an unchangeable structure, a pragmatic expediency that still wants to take the social structure as plastic and changeable comes to be thought of as “utopian”’. 

Laurence


From: David McAleavey 
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 5:40 PM
To: ssc 
Subject: [SSC] A Practice that Aspires

Dear All, 

As promised.

Respectfully yours,

David


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
SSC mailing list
SSC at lists.aktivix.org
https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/ssc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/ssc/attachments/20130113/26e1dd67/attachment.html>