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Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion Human Engagement and the Self Yusef Waghid Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu Judith Terblanche Faiq Waghid Zayd Waghid
Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion
Yusef Waghid Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu Judith Terblanche • Faiq Waghid Zayd Waghid
Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion Human Engagement and the Self
Yusef Waghid Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, South Africa Judith Terblanche Department of Accounting University of the Western Cape Bellville, South Africa Zayd Waghid Faculty of Education Cape Peninsula University of Technology Mowbray, South Africa
Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu School of Education University of Malawi Zomba, Malawi Faiq Waghid Centre for Innovative Learning Technology Cape Peninsula University of Technology Cape Town, South Africa
ISBN 978-3-030-38426-5 ISBN 978-3-030-38427-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword
It is generally accepted that public education was first created in Western societies to do two things: create workers for the newly emerging industrial economy that required at least minimal levels of literacy and numeracy; and forge a common citizenry out of the desperate peoples found in modern nation-states. In both cases homogeneity was regarded as very important; workers needed common skill sets and attitudes, and citizens needed to be weaned away from their socio-cultural particularities into compliance and loyalty to the nation-state. The forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism saw these approaches to education spread well beyond the so-called West. While there has been considerable critique of the industrial and homogenising nature of public schooling around the world, the general template has proven quite resilient and largely persists to this day. The authors of this book for example, are critical of the “neo-liberal ideology in modern education” which is both narrowly focused on producing workers and is dismissive of local and diverse perspectives. In the jurisdiction where I live, the provincial government recently released a discussion paper on public education which criticises the original industrial model but begins with the sentence: “Our province needs a literate, numerate, critical thinking, problem-solving, workforce if we’re going to succeed” (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, 2019, p. 3). It seems the type of industries might have changed, but preparation for work continues to dominate the purposes and structures of public education. Around the world, democratic jurisdictions have struggled to move citizenship education away from its focus on ethnic and national cohesion v
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to approaches more open to fostering diversity and difference. A contemporary expression of the later is the movement to global education or, as one multilateral organisation puts it “global competencies” (OECD, 2018). A problem with this, however, is that global education is often as homogenising as previous approaches to citizenship education. It is very much like what the authors of this volume call “an absolutist transcendent conception of cosmopolitanism that demands every society to conform to allegedly universal and objective cosmopolitan norms.” In this book, the authors reject both neo-liberal and conformist goals for education. Instead, they propose a cosmopolitan education through which “people engage with difference.” They do this in quite a cosmopolitan way, drawing on the work of nine prominent philosophers, five women and four men, with very different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and working in diverse parts of the world. The scholars focused on the idea of cosmopolitanism differently, but the authors of this volume weave together a set of coherent and consistent themes from their work. They then explore the implications of these themes for higher education generally and in an African context in particular. First, engagement with difference is central to cosmopolitan education. The dominant approach to cosmopolitanism is the absolutist one described briefly above, but the philosophers drawn on here all “conceive of cosmopolitanism as an act of engaging with difference.” Human beings are inherently cultural, cannot be divorced from their cultural context, and, therefore, cosmopolitan education has to engage with cultural difference in ways that are respectful and safe. As the authors put it, “rooted cosmopolitanism must necessarily be responsive to the sources of individual rootedness for different people across the world.” Second, cosmopolitan education is deliberative. It provides a place where people from different cultural contexts and backgrounds feel safe to make their case. It is akin, in Derrida’s view, to a biblical “city of refuge,” a sheltered place where people’s stories and worldviews can be examined and respectfully considered. Third, reflection, and particularly self-reflection, is key to cosmopolitan education. One cannot engage thoughtfully with difference without “the skill or capacity to engage critically with his or her own embedded values, beliefs and particular worldview.” I have seen this repeatedly in my own work on how teachers and students conceive of and think about diversity. Most often they exhibit little or no sense that their own view is not “normal” or “universal” and this results in them categorising other views as
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foreign, strange and even pathological (Peck, Sears, & Donaldson, 2008, Peck & Sears, 2014, Hamm, Peck, & Sears, 2018). The starting point for deep engagement with difference is recognition of one’s own positioning. Fourth, cosmopolitanism is very complex and so is a comprehensive approach to cosmopolitan education. These authors reject the homogenous approach to cosmopolitanism which, by definition, is much simpler than the “rooted” approach that engages with the interaction between and among cultural perspectives. They also reject the “world traveller” approach which, in the words of Marianna Papastephanou, sees cosmopolitans “as individuals who appear to function comfortably (outwardly) in various countries, frequently crossing international borders, and who seemingly embrace the globalised world as currently reality.” For the authors of this book, the point of cosmopolitan education is not to create jetsetters, but rather to foster engaged and effective citizenship that seeks social justice and equity in a complex and diverse world. The last chapter of the book seeks to apply these themes by exploring their implications for massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have been popular in Western education systems and these, authors argue, have the potential to address key issues in African higher education including accessibility and moving from the dominant “instructivist” model of education in most institutions to more “connectivist” approaches. The former emphasises the accumulation and recall of isolated facts, while the latter puts students at the centre and seeks to foster substantial connections among people leading to deep learning and understanding. One approach breeds homogeneity and rejects cultural rootedness and difference, while the other makes exploring difference the centre of education. In the view of these authors, “a cosmopolitan-deliberative approach can offer the implementation of MOOCs some ways as to why and how difference, dissent, and otherness can be cultivated among South African students and learners.” They make a compelling case that this is so. NB, Canada
Alan Sears
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References Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. (2019). Succeeding at home: A green paper on education in New Brunswick. Retrieved from Government of New Brunswick website: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/ dam/gnb/Departments/ed/pdf/promo/summit/GreenPaper.pdf Hamm, L., Peck, C. L., & Sears, A. (2018). “Don’t even think about bringing that to school”: New Brunswick students’ understandings of ethnic diversity. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 13(2), 101–119. https://doi. org/10.1177/1746197917699219. OECD. (2018). Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world the OECD Pisa Global Competence Framework. Paris: Directorate for Education and Skills. Peck, C. L., & Sears, A. (2014, April 3). Teachers’ understandings of ethnic diversity: After 40+ years of official multiculturalism in Canada, are we any further ahead? Presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia. Peck, C. L., Sears, A., & Donaldson, S. (2008). Unreached and unreachable? Curriculum standards and children’s understanding of ethnic diversity in Canada. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(1), 63–92.
Preface
Education has long been associated with acts of human engagement. Ancient Greek thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, have never looked at education (padeia) as independent from human interactions. Likewise, neo-Aristotelians, such as al-Farabi and al-Ghazzali in the Islamic tradition, considered education inextricably linked to acts of human engagement (shura). Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim philosopher-historian, was adamant that education ought to be associated with human (social) practices. To look at education other than seeing it as the involvment of humans in social practices would therefore be remiss of a necessary understanding of the concept. Simply put, education involves the human act of engagement whereby people get to experience one another on account of what they present through their interactions. Of course, there are different understandings of education on the basis of how one wants to elucidate the concept. And, as Muslim or Buddhist education reveals a particular kind of education, in the same manner, cosmopolitan education—the subject of this book—presents a particular understanding of education. If one were to conceive of cosmopolitanism as an act of engaging with difference, for instance, a person connecting with others and their otherness, then such a form of education accentuates the importance of bringing education into play with diversity and difference. The kind of cosmopolitan education that we wish to exposit in this book is one where people engage with difference. Considering that cosmopolitan education already involves an education that connects with otherness, it might not be implausible to argue that those who are not other would invariably be excluded from human ix
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engagement. For instance, sameness would imply that there might be no otherness and, consequently, the idea of cosmopolitanism might not be in the present. However, sameness or being similar does not necessarily imply a lack of otherness. One can be exposed to similar teaching methods but this does not mean that one’s learning would not be different to that of others. It could well be, as is the case with so many students in a university classroom, that these students might be subjected to similar methods of teaching. But, this does not mean that their learning is exactly the same. It might be that some students happen to be more critical than others; yet, they might have been exposed to similar teaching approaches. The point is that otherness cannot be wished away on the grounds of similarities with which people are confronted. There might also be the element of difference in learning irrespective of how similar teaching might have occurred. What follows, is that those who might learn differently—irrespective of having been taught in the same manner—will therefore not necessarily be excluded from an educational encounter. Hence, those who are other might not have to be excluded from an educational encounter. For this reason, cosmopolitan education does not have to be delinked from inclusion. The argument in this manuscript is that cosmopolitan education engenders pedagogical spaces for encounters to be inclusive despite its emphasis on difference and otherness. Put more succinctly, one might be exposed to a cosmopolitan education but this does not always mean that one would be excluded. Our interest in this book is to show how cosmopolitan education enhances human inclusion rather than exclusion, despite the possibility that exclusion might also occur. As our main premise, the argument in this book is about the possibility of cosmopolitan education to include without being remiss of the possibility that such a form of education could also exclude. And, when the latter occurs, ways have to be found to cultivate inclusive human relations rather than perpetuating exclusion. Premised on the propositional thought of Immanuel Kant on cosmopolitanism, we infer that humans have a natural inclination towards freedom of expression and rationality in an atmosphere of antagonistic relations among themselves. In this way, humans are citizens in the world in terms of which they exercise their free and rational will in a spirit of resistance to achieve their cosmopolitan goals. For Kant (2010, p. 25), in considering the world, humans contemplate and apply their “supreme wisdom … to remain a constant reproach to everything else.” Our interest in this book is how humans in pedagogical encounters exercise their freedom and rationality in relation to one another guided by co-operative,
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co-existential and oppositional acts of resistance. It is on such an idea of cosmopolitan thought that we build throughout this book and according to which we elucidate and expand the deliberative spirit of university pedagogical encounters. In light of the afore-mentioned Kantian argument, namely that humans are citizens in a world in which they exercise their freedom and rationality in an atmosphere of oppositional acts of resistance—a matter of enacting their (human) cosmopolitan purpose in the world, we have organised the book as follows: In Chap. 1, we expound on Martha C. Nussbaum’s notion of universal hospitality in the pursuit of universal aspirations and world co-operation in an atmosphere of respect and human dignity. We specifically show why respect for cultural differences and an enactment of human responsibility can contribute towards confronting human problems on the basis of critical argumentation and deliberation as human beings endeavour to eradicate prejudice, inequality and injustices vis-à-vis their educational concerns. In Chap. 2, we use a Derridian understanding of cosmopolitanism to show why and how human relationships ought to be guided by a consideration to cultivate unconditional hospitality. As an attempt to accentuate the latter view of unconditional hospitality we rely on Derrida’s explication of interruption as an act of forgiveness to show how forgiving the unforgiveable paves the way for human encounters enveloped by unconditional hospitality. We argue that such an understanding of unconditional hospitality guided by the act of forgiveness has much to offer to the contention against hatred, resentment, torture, genocide and other crimes against humanity. In Chap. 3, we use Seyla Benhabib’s understanding of universalism that centres difference in conceptualising cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, following Benhabib, is more plausible if it invokes a conceptualisation of universalism that privileges subjectivities in the constitution of our individual and collective autonomy as humans. In this chapter, we contend that a difference-based notion of cosmopolitanism can guide democratic iterations underscored by communicative freedom. In Chap. 4, we discuss the notion of inclusive cosmopolitanism as espoused by Kwame A. Appiah. The central theme of Appiah’s cosmopolitanism is the idea of rooted cosmopolitanism. Rooted cosmopolitanism is grounded in the distinction Appiah draws between moral and ethical duties. On the one hand, moral duties pertain to the impartiality in the generally thin relations that are political in nature and governed by such things as distributive schemes of a society. Such duties could either be in reference to local or global people. Ethical duties, on
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the other hand, pertain to the realm of individual commitments grounded in the nature of the individual as an embedded autonomous choice-making being about what constitutes the good life. The ethical person is an embedded being in a complex set of different personal relationships. Though individuals differently value the social-cultural context of their embedded-ness, elements of such a context are however, indispensable in the expression and concreteness of the autonomy of the individual. In this chapter, we contend that education informed by rooted cosmopolitanism must necessarily be responsive to the sources of individual rootedness for different people across the world. In Chap. 5, employing Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitanism, we argue that forms of cosmopolitanism that are preconditioned on the exclusion of culture in the configuration of universalism cannot achieve the cosmopolitan aspirations of equality. Human beings are enmeshed in culture though the notion of culture is usually under contestation. Individuals are usually unconscious of the entrenched role of culture in their routines of everyday life such that even the most radically liberal individuals and societies cannot successfully decouple their lives from the influence of culture. The chapter borrows from Waldron’s position that generally all cultures have a cosmopolitan dimension since living everyday life involves endeavours of learning from other cultures and unlearning received attitudes and practices and values. Everyday life for every culture also involves seeking convincing justificatory reasons for practices and attitudes one has by virtue of being a member of one group. In Chap. 6, using Sharon Todd’s notions of judgement and “cosmopolitics,” which is a contestation of cosmopolitan universalism, we contend that learners are not a homogeneous group with generally common fundamental interests. What constitutes their moral needs as moral persons seeking just encounters and relations can be met by a cosmopolitanism that emphasises and embeds common values only in the objective roles and rules that govern educational encounters. The chapter argues that learners are concrete beings with constitutively different moral needs and interests, which cannot all be couched up in impartialist terms in order to expect that adherence to impartial rules and roles will guarantee satisfaction of cosmopolitan ideals. Given this background, it is imperative that judgement-making in the university by teachers and others should not be restricted to Todd’s idea of scripted cosmopolitanism, but rather intersubjectivity must contextualise rules and roles to avoid the risk of ignoring and undermining legitimate moral interests that reside in a
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learner’s otherness as a concrete being. In Chap. 7, we propose that the rationale of cosmopolitan education developed in this book is constituted by a notion of justice. In reference to Amy Gutmann’s understanding of democratic justice, we analyse how cosmopolitan education manifests in educational encounters. Firstly, we argue that democratic justice implies equalising human encounters to the extent that people engage freely. Secondly, we contend that exercising one’s freedom cannot result in constrained human action whereby people are prevented to speak their minds. Rather, unlike Gutmann’s view that unjust speech should be constrained, we argue that speech should be reconfigured to deal with harmful speech in the way Judith Butler proposes. Thirdly, democratic justice should have the effect that people take into controversy one another’s taken-for- granted understandings. Through dissonance, human action would be poignantly poised to enacting just, cosmopolitan encounters. In Chap. 8, we draw specifically on the views of Marianna Papastephanou, who has reservations about some of the attributes that are often associated with cosmopolitanism. In the main, we argue that there is an inherent connection between cosmopolitanism and democracy. We discuss the possible implication of cosmopolitanism, as viewed by Papastephanou, for education. We specifically focus on deliberative education, which could be described as education that is concerned with pedagogical practices that incorporate encounters with the other. In Chap. 9, we draw on the seminal thoughts of David T. Hansen who takes a different look at cosmopolitanism and makes a cogent case for the notion of a reflexive openness to the self and what is known to the self. Put differently, cosmopolitanism as pursuing a reflexive openness to the self implies that one has to be open and reflexive towards that which is known to one—a matter of performing self-introspection and self-criticism. Only then the possibility exists for one to be open and critical to that which is known to one. Hansen further makes the case that cosmopolitanism is also about enhancing a reflexive openness to that which is still in becoming—an idea that undermines any thought that cosmopolitanism can be completely known. Drawing on Hansen’s reflexive idea of cosmopolitanism, we argue why and how higher educational encounters can become self-reflexive and open to that which remains in becoming. We then analyse how pedagogical encounters manifesting with such an open and reflexive cosmopolitanism can guide education differently. In Chap. 10, we aim to respond to the following questions:
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• first, how do we prepare students/learners from historically disadvantaged communities for a changing environment, one in which massive open online courses (MOOCs) may be necessary particularly with the drive towards what has become known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution teaching and learning; and • second, how can we begin to establish MOOCs that focus on the lived experiences of Africans, more specifically a MOOC that places African students/learners at the fulcrum of their learning? The need for a MOOC that aims to enhance African and Western knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural boundaries, on the one hand, while addressing societal inequities of student access to higher education in Africa, on the other, is vital in the quest for addressing instances of cognitive and social injustice in southern contexts. With further research required into southern learner-educator experiences, MOOCs premised on what we argue for in this chapter, namely defence of a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework could create learning opportunities for students in such contexts in harnessing the educational potential of the Internet. Such an understanding of MOOCs holds for students the possibility of transforming the societal inequities of student access to higher education of the southern contexts through knowledge acquisition, sharing and co-construction towards developing agency in such students. Yusef Waghid Stellenbosch University, South Africa Zomba, Malawi Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu Bellville, South Africa Judith Terblanche Cape Town, South Africa Faiq Waghid Mowbray, South Africa Zayd Waghid
Reference Kant, I. (2010). Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose. In G. W. Brown & D. Held (Eds.), The cosmopolitan reader (pp. 17–26). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Contents
1 Citizens of the World: A Neo-Kantian View 1 2 A City of Refuge for Innocents: Cosmopolitanism as an Interruption 9 3 Cosmopolitan Norms and the Art of Deliberation: Beyond Forgiveness 17 4 Rooted Cosmopolitan Education 29 5 The Challenge of Culture in Cosmopolitanism 41 6 Universalism and Judgements in Educational Encounters 53 7 Centring Deliberation in Modern Educational Encounters 71 8 On Cosmopolitanism Through Deliberative Education Extended: Beyond Moral Respect 85 9 In Becoming Reflexive: Implications for Education105
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10 Developing a Cosmopolitanist-deliberative Framework for MOOCs in South African (Higher) Education121 Blurb141 Index143
CHAPTER 1
Citizens of the World: A Neo-Kantian View
Abstract In this chapter, we expound on Martha C. Nussbaum’s notion of universal hospitality in the pursuit of universal aspirations and world co-operation in an atmosphere of respect and human dignity. We specifically show why respect for cultural differences and an enactment of human responsibility can contribute towards confronting human problems on the basis of critical argumentation and deliberation as human beings endeavour to eradicate prejudice, inequality and injustices vis-à-vis their educational concerns. Nussbaum frames her understanding of cosmopolitanism in light of Greek Stoicism, which considers the basis for human community as constituted in the worth of reason in each and every human being. We specifically expound on the idea of a cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world whose dignity is bounded by reason and respect for other human beings. Thereafter, we show how such a view of cosmopolitanism influences education, more specifically teaching and learning at universities. Keywords Universal hospitality • Co-operation • Respect • Dignity • Cultural differences • Responsibility • Argumentation • Deliberation • Prejudice • Inequality • Injustices • Educational concerns • Cosmopolitanism • Community • Reason • Citizen • Teaching • Learning • Universities
© The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2_1
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Introduction One of the most vigorous proponents of a neo-Kantian understanding of cosmopolitanism is the American political philosopher, Martha Nussbaum (2010). Nussbaum frames her understanding of cosmopolitanism in light of Greek Stoicism, which considers the basis for human community as constituted in ‘the worth of reason in each and every human being’ (2010, p. 30). In this chapter, referring to Martha Nussbaum’s notion of a cosmopolitan being, we expound on the idea of a cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world whose dignity is bounded by reason and respect for other human beings. Thereafter, we show how such a view of cosmopolitanism influences education, more specifically teaching and learning at universities.
Reason, Respect and Deliberation According to Nussbaum (2010, p. 30), cosmopolitans revere reason as the basis for all human action. Citing the Greek Stoic, Cicero, Nussbaum (2010, p. 30) holds that every human being ought to promote the moral well-being of all other humans on the grounds of being rational. By rationality, Nussbaum recognises the importance of holding all humans accountable to the moral standards of treating all other humans with equal respect irrespective of their differences in nationality, class, ethnic affiliation or gender (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 31). Consequently, discriminating against human beings on the basis of the above-mentioned differences is not only tantamount to an act of showing disrespect but also acting irrationally, and by implication, in an un-cosmopolitan way. Without exercising respect for reason, humans would not be capable of resolving their problems. This is so, because humans cannot make moral judgements about other human beings without the virtue of respect and dignity towards others. And, when humans do not act rationally, they would in any case be incapable of engaging in deliberations about problems common to all humans, including themselves. Put differently, human problems ought to be resolved on the basis of deliberations guided by acts of rationality. The latter practice is the first condition of acting in a cosmopolitan manner. That is, humans live out their lives as citizens of the world or cosmopolitans when they engage with all other humans on the grounds of rationality and respect for one another (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 30). Acting in a cosmopolitan manner, therefore, has at least the following three practices in mind:
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Firstly, central to treating all human beings with dignity and respect as citizens of the world is the idea that all humans are “our fellow city dwellers” and should not be thought of as “strangers” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 31). Drawing on Cicero once again, Nussbaum posits “we should think of nobody as a stranger, as outside our sphere of concern and obligation” (2010, p. 31). And, when no one in a cosmopolitan world is considered a stranger then all humans are considered welcome everywhere. By implication, human hospitality seems to be the basis according to which all human beings are recognised and treated respectfully everywhere. In this regard, Nussbaum (2010, p. 32) extends the idea of cosmopolitan hospitality to “come to respect the humanity even of our political enemies, thinking of ourselves as born to work together and inspired by a common purpose.” The upshot of such a view of cosmopolitanism is that humans would not be in a position to deliberate with one another about their common problems if they do not show respect for one another’s perspectives and treat one another’s different points of view with the dignity it deserves. The practice of cosmopolitan hospitality seems to be connected to cultivating deliberations about human problems. Irrespective of whether human beings were to be waged in war or their actions motivated by feelings of wanting to see the extermination of others and hatred for others, respect for human dignity and the virtue of reason should always be revered (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 33). Nussbaum (2010, p. 32) avers that such Stoic cosmopolitanism is primarily concerned with the “renunciation of aggression and the resort to force only in self-defense, when all discussion has proven futile” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 32). In other words, cosmopolitans do not rule out hostility in its entirety, but only when all efforts at rational human engagement have failed to yield desirable results, “punishments” may be meted out. Here, one specifically thinks of the necessity to curb further acts of violence perpetrated against the citizens of Yemen. The incumbent (and we would argue, necessary) hostile actions of others in avoiding further starvation of many of the citizens of the beleaguered and war-stricken country, become necessary to prevent further acts of aggression on the part of those who perpetrate violence on local communities. In other words, when deliberations about peaceful co-existence and respect for human dignity have not had the desired effects, acts of hostility become necessary to halt further violations of human rights and dignity. It behoves antagonistic groups in the Saudis and Houthis of Yemen—claimed to be supported by Shia militia funded by Iran—to engage rationally in deliberation about the ongoing and devastating war in the country that
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has already resulted in human starvation and genocide. Only then would respect for reason and human dignity have manifested in the actions of people. That is, the possibility of living in a cosmopolitan way would be enhanced when rationality and respect for one another would hold sway. Secondly, Nussbaum uses the view Diogenes, the Greek Cynic had of being “a citizen of the world” as a premise to espouse the insistence of cosmopolitanism that humans are affiliated both to their rationality and to “universal aspirations and concerns” (2010, p. 29). Being affiliated to her rational humanity, a “citizen of the world,” following Nussbaum (2010, pp. 29–30), in effect dwells in two communities: the local community of his or her birth and the community of human argument and engagement. And, as for the Stoics and Nussbaum, this collective community comprises both a moral and a social world. In a moral world, cosmopolitans do not abandon their local identities and affiliations and give what is near to them a special degree of attention and concern; in a social world, cosmopolitans are bounded by their interconnectedness with and empathic caring towards other humans (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 32). As aptly posited by Nussbaum (2010, p. 32): The life of the world citizen is, in effect as Diogenes the Cynic said, a kind of exile—from the comfort of local truths, from the warm nestling feeling of local loyalties, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one’s own … [to a] concern with goals of world cooperation and respect for personhood.
From the afore-mentioned explication of cosmopolitanism, it can be deduced that the concept is overwhelmingly prejudiced towards the social, that is, “goals of world cooperation” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 32). Simultaneously, it appears as if cosmopolitanism wrestles with immoral actions such as pride and conceit that seem to undermine selfhood. It is not that cosmopolitanism totally abandons local loyalties in its entirety, but rather, such loyalties are exchanged for a wider social responsiveness reminiscent of cosmopolitan actions. Thirdly, Nussbaum’s (2010, p. 41) neo-Kantian view of cosmopolitanism is at once concerned with a passionate duty to defend cosmopolitan humanism. And, when racism, sexism, suspicion and hatred of foreigners escalate in our world community, it behoves all humans to address and counteract such divisive passions. In this sense, Nussbaum (2010, p. 39, 42) argues for a neo-Kantian view of “social enlightenment” through
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which cosmopolitan humanism ought to be protected through reason—a matter of “doing something useful for the common good.” The latter implies that when racial hatred, bigotry and xenophobia raise their ugly heads, human passions ought to be “enlightened” through institutionalised educational agendas to combat such indefensible acts of aggression and hatred (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 41). What follows from such a neo- Kantian view of world citizenship, is that universities ought to educate teachers and students to combat such passions on the basis that we (humans) can engage with and learn from all other humans—a matter of enlightening human passions (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 39).
Educational Implications of Nussbaum’s Cosmopolitanism We now expound on a university course with which one of us has been involved during its initial phase of conceptualisation, named “Diversity and Inclusivity” for Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students at the institution where he works. Although some of the goals and the content of the course have been changed over the years, it was the early focus on three aspects that is of importance to the ensuing discussion vis-à-vis Nussbaum’s notion of cosmopolitan education. Bearing in mind that Nussbaum’s framework for cosmopolitan education invariably involves treating no one as a stranger; cultivating rational and universal aspirations and concerns; and enacting one’s enlightened passionate duty in community, he devised the “Diversity and Inclusivity” course for prospective teachers with the assistance of colleagues, along the following lines: Firstly, we thought it apposite to frame the rationale of the course in such a way that it aimed to produce students who recognise and respect cultural differences as an important aspect of human living. Attuned to the idea of a kosmou politès (world citizen), we envisaged that the course would produce students who consider their duty “to treat humanity with respect [which] requires us to treat aliens on our soil with honor and hospitality” (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 59). The emphasis the course placed on diversity was premised on the assumption that we recognised humanity as a community of reason and morality, and as aptly put by Nussbaum (2000, p. 58), by not allowing “differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings.” Based on the afore-mentioned view of an education for a plurality
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of cultures, we cultivated an awareness of cultural difference on the basis of exposing students to discussions and debates in and about ethnic, racial, sexual, cultural and religious differences in order to promote understanding of and respect for the other. In a way, the course required of students and teachers to become, what Nussbaum refers to as “philosophical exiles from our own ways of life, seeing them from the vantage point of the outsider and asking the questions an outsider is likely to ask about their meaning and function” (2000, p. 58). In a different way, the course encouraged students and teachers to become detached from an uncritical loyalty to their own ways of being and doing. Only when an individual learns to become distanced from an unbridled loyalty to his or her own identity, tradition and custom would the possibility arise that he or she respects others and their differences. This claim is vindicated by Nussbaum’s (2000, p. 69) assertion that the “world citizen must develop [a] sympathetic understanding of distant cultures and of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities within her own … [and] also develop an understanding of the history and variety of human ideas of gender and sexuality.” What is worth mentioning, is that lively and engaging debate unfolded in one of his classes when xenophobic violence was perpetrated against foreign nationals in South Africa, particularly Somali shopkeepers who were accused— wrongly we would add—by some indigenous communities of depriving them of work opportunities in the country. Clearly, a dismissal of other cultures and ways of being was apparent during the height of xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals during the 2000s. Unless cultural differences are going to be recognised and respected, coexisting and cooperating as world citizens would be remote from human living. Secondly, at a time of designing, developing and implementing the course of “Diversity and Inclusivity,” much was said in the media about the precarious conditions of hunger and poverty as well as ethnic tensions and conflict in some parts of the African continent. For us, one way of responding to such malaises on the African continent and the rest of the world for that matter, is to learn to think how to confront such societal concerns. The rationale that underpinned the course was both an acknowledgement that we are citizens of the world, and that it is our responsibility to confront and/or avoid human problems in and about issues that require global and local perspectives. Consequently, we included themes such as agricultural production and the eradication of inequality, hunger and famine on the continent, and world citizenship as a response to human rights violations and war crimes committed on the African continent and in the
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world with the idea to awaken critical and autonomous thought about such predicaments. As succinctly put by Nussbaum (2000, p. 84): [This course aims] to show our students the beauty and interest of life that is open to the whole world, to show them that there is after all more joy in the kind of citizenship that questions than in the kind that simply applauds, more fascination in the study of human beings in all their real variety and complexity than in the zealous pursuits of superficial stereotypes.
Thirdly, the “Diversity and Inclusivity” curriculum was designed to encourage rigorous critical argumentation and deliberation about counteracting racism and prejudice, considering the history of Africa’s peoples in particular, having been subjected to colonialism and apartheid. Similarly, the curriculum was also devised in such a way as to accentuate, as aptly remarked by Nussbaum (2000, p. 179), “the interdependence of all the world’s peoples and their need for mutual understanding.” In other words, the curriculum was committed to producing cosmopolitan citizens who not only knew themselves and their histories, but also how to combat racial prejudice, exclusion and coloniality—that is, those unequal structures that have remained entrenched in institutional systems. In a way, the curriculum addressed issues of decoloniality and political transformation. It is not surprising to note that the course on “Diversity and Inclusivity” presented students and teachers opportunities to engage in rigorous scholarship in and about educational matters pertaining to the cultivation of democratic citizenship and decoloniality on the African continent and, in particular, the critical responses of indigenous cultures to the idea of world citizenship. In a way, the “Diversity and Inclusivity” course sought to offer a civic response to some of the most pressing issues of human difference, such as racial prejudice, inequality and societal injustice.
Summary In this chapter, we expounded on the notion of Nussbaum’s neo-Kantian view of cosmopolitanism in relation to education. Central to Nussbaum’s view of cosmopolitanism is the idea that respect and dignity towards all humans should be exercised to cultivate universal aspirations and world co-operation among them in the pursuit of common goods. Such a view of cosmopolitanism does not ignore local traditions and customs but rather argues that a rational explication of such local identities be used for
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the benefit of world interests as a vindication of universal hospitality. Such a view of cosmopolitanism engenders respect for cultural differences together with an enactment of human responsibility in confronting problems in an atmosphere of critical argumentation and deliberation in order to eradicate prejudice, inequality and injustices.
References Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Kant and cosmopolitanism. In G. Wallace-Brown & D. Held (Eds.), The cosmopolitan reader (pp. 27–44). Cambridge: Polity Press.
CHAPTER 2
A City of Refuge for Innocents: Cosmopolitanism as an Interruption
Abstract In this chapter, we use a Derridian understanding of cosmopolitanism to show why and how human relationships ought to be guided by a consideration to cultivate unconditional hospitality. As an attempt to accentuate the latter view of unconditional hospitality we rely on Derrida’s explication of interruption as an act of forgiveness to show how forgiving the unforgiveable paves the way for human encounters enveloped by unconditional hospitality. We argue that such an understanding of unconditional hospitality guided by the act of forgiveness has much to offer to the contention against hatred, resentment, torture, genocide and other crimes against humanity. More specifically, we show that Derrida pushes the boundaries of the concept by invoking a notion of interruption that advances Nussbaum’s rationalistic view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida offers an explanation for cosmopolitanism as an interruption that might not seem possible, but yet manifests in human practices. If something does not initially seem possible, then there must be the possibility that such something might not occur. And, it is quite possible, following Derrida, that cosmopolitanism might not happen, more specifically, it might not unfold in patterns of human engagement Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Relationships • Unconditional hospitality • Interruption • Forgiveness • Human encounters • Forgiveness • Hatred • Torture • Crimes against humanity • Human practices • Human engagement © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2_2
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Introduction In the previous chapter, we explicated a neo-Kantian view of cosmopolitanism that accentuates an understanding that the concept is predominantly concerned with the cultivation of rational beings that consider all others, including themselves, as citizens of the world. These citizens are obliged to engage with one another’s perspectives in the pursuit of enacting their human responsibilities. The point is, when speaking about cosmopolitan beings, such persons are concerned with engaging others rationally and enacting their responsibility to humanity in mutual fashion. Building on the latter understanding of cosmopolitanism, in this chapter, we offer an account of Jacques Derrida’s enunciation of cosmopolitanism in relation to the metaphoric expression, cities of refuge (Derrida, 2010). Thereafter, we examine some of the implications of cities of refuge—more specifically a cosmopolitanism of forgiveness—for education.
Cosmopolitanism as an Interruption We are attracted to Derrida’s enunciation of cosmopolitanism on the grounds that he offers an extended view of the concept. By this is meant that, besides confining the concept to rational and responsible engagement among all human beings, Derrida (2010) pushes the boundaries of the concept by invoking a notion of interruption that advances Nussbaum’s (2000) rationalistic view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida (2010) offers an explanation for cosmopolitanism as an interruption that might not seem possible, but yet manifests in human practices. If something does not initially seem possible, then there must be the possibility that such something might not occur. And, it is quite possible, following Derrida (2010), that cosmopolitanism might not happen, more specifically, it might not unfold in patterns of human engagement. However, considering that cosmopolitanism is considered an interruption, the question is, how does it (cosmopolitanism) become possible? More specifically, what makes cosmopolitanism what it is, if the concept were to manifest in “cities of refuge”? Following Derrida (2010, p. 17), cities of refuge “welcome and protect those innocents who sought refuge from … bloody vengeance.” That is, the right to immunity and hospitality is accorded those people who have been subjected to “acts of censorships (censure) or of terrorism, of persecutions and of enslavements in all their forms” (Derrida, 2010, p. 5). We are thinking specifically of journalists who endure extreme
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overnmental censorships on account of their reporting criticisms about g authoritarian regimes. Here, we specifically think of one of the journalists of the Al-Jazeera broadcasting network who has been incarcerated without standing trial for more than three years by the Egyptian regime; and of citizens of countries that have to flee acts of terror against civilian communities—for instance, thousands of Syrians are leaving their country as a consequence of what has become known as the “war on terror.” We also think of those people who had to endure, in many cases, humiliation and torture at the hands of despotic dictatorships everywhere in the world. Thus, when any of the groups of people mentioned above were to seek asylum in a country of their choice, where they feel they would be protected against possible incarceration and even death in their own countries, they can exercise their political and moral right to seek refuge in a “city of refuge” where they would be treated hospitably on arrival and be protected by law to enjoy what Derrida refers to as “the right of visitation” (2010, p. 17). At the time of writing this section of the book, Guatemalans formed a caravan on the route to the United States, only to be halted harshly at the US–Mexican border crossing for attempting to seek refuge in the United States, despite many of the people’s self-proclaimed innocence to seek legitimate political asylum, and to be deserved subjects of temporary visitation. Likewise, the situation for seeking asylum in many European countries has escalated to an anti-immigrant rhetoric that many people, fleeing their war-torn countries, have been denied even in terms of temporary visitation rights. Simply put, the legitimate right of innocent people seeking refuge in many European countries is denied them on the grounds that their universal right to hospitality is brought into question by several European nations. It does seem as if the cosmopolitan right to temporary refuge is becoming more and more difficult to exercise on the part of nation-states. Despite the impediments that many countries have put into place to constrain temporary visitation to their lands, some governments have actually interrupted resistance to universal hospitality by granting some migrants the right to asylum. This act of interruption to universal hospitality was enacted to make possible what became seemingly impossible in the sense that hospitality, such as what happened in France (Derrida, 2010, p. 21), was vehemently opposed. Consequently, when the limits to universal hospitality are interrupted, the possibility of people’s right to visitation becomes enhanced. Yet, the right to visitation on the part of migrants is tantamount to an excluded hospitality in the sense that a right of p ermanent
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residence is not immediately granted (Derrida, 2010, p. 21). We concur with Derrida (2010) that denying migrants right of residence on entering a foreign country for a temporary period might not necessarily be an uncosmopolitan act because allowing time for reflection on asylum and the perpetuation of peace in the quest to cultivate new democratic communities is a necessary condition for the cultivation of human responsibility (Derrida, 2010, p. 23). Even the condition of unconditional hospitality is provisional upon the cultivation of newly established democratic communities that can live peacefully and responsibly together. This does not merely imply that migrants ought to work towards peaceful human co- existence and co-operation but also that those citizens who initially showed their hospitality towards migrants should be concerned with cultivating democratic communities. The point about interruption is that it should make the emergence of new democratic communities possible in terms of which respect for one another and responsibility towards one another would be harnessed. This situation has become increasingly difficult in communities where exuberant patriotism and exclusion of the other have escalated. Only when hostility towards those considered strangers is waning, will universal hospitality towards migrants cease to remain elusive. However, if such inhospitality can be interrupted, the possibility for respectful, responsible and humane acts of living might be possible. Here, we are specifically thinking of acts of xenophobia perpetrated against refugees from other African countries in South Africa. An interrupted act of conditional hospitality could pave the way for acts of humane co-existence such as what transpired when local communities themselves spoke out against unwanted acts of xenophobia perpetrated against some asylum seekers in South Africa. The latter, is what we understand Derrida (2010, p. 5) intimates, when he refers to evoking a “new charter of hospitality”— one brought about through the interruption of conditional hospitality.
Implications of an Interrupted Conditional Hospitality for Education Education in a Kantian sense is concerned with humans engaging rationally with one another—that is, they (humans) give an account of their claims or propositions based on the force of reasons. In a way, such humans show hospitality towards one another on the grounds that they take into consideration one another’s reasonable or reason-informed claims. It is
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not that humans merely engage, but rather, humans are governed by the strength of reasons they offer each other in defence of their justifications. They proffer reasons on the basis of which they remain hospitably in conversation with one another. Yet, there can also be a situation where some humans are insistent that their claims—albeit unreasonable—should hold sway. The question is how does one hold an educative relation together where one set of reasons is considered to be persuasive, and another’s reasons are deemed unreasonable, yet claimed by them to be reasonable? Any abandonment of the other would render the relationship irreconcilable and, by implication, not worthy of further engagement. If such a situation unfolds, human engagement would invariably be wanting and the possibility that humans might find each other’s view reconcilable, might also be unlikely. To achieve unconditional hospitality, a situation ought to arise where humans learn to live with others’ perspectives or different points of view. Any attempt at coercing others to think and act like one does, would be an immediate recipe for disengagement or an unwillingness to engage with one another. It is here that Derrida’s idea of interruption offers a way to make educative human relations more enduring. If one accepts— together with others—that educative human relations can be subjected to an interrupted conditional hospitality, then one and others already contend from the beginning they ought to agree that one cannot coerce others to think and do as, for instance, a dominant view intimates. For instance, one cannot operate from the premise that others have to abandon their different truth claims and agree with one on the grounds of wanting others to agree with one. More educative human relations are those where one can engage with the otherness of others irrespective of how different or repugnant others’ views might seem to be. In other words, there should always be a readiness on the part of one to consider others’ views and even a preparedness to be persuaded by others’ different views. That is, one should interrupt one’s unwillingness to listen to diverse and contrasting views other than one’s own if one envisages that educative encounters will remain ongoing. Failing to do so, would not only stunt further engagement but also render the other’s views incapable of persuading one or even resulting in abandoning one’s views. Interrupting a conditional hospitable relationship therefore implies that one expresses a willingness to be persuaded by others even if such views might appear at first to be irreconcilable with one’s own perspectives. Interrupting one’s own views is, firstly, an acknowledgement that one shows a willingness to
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be persuaded by others. Any attempt to do so, would abruptly stifle the conversation and render the educational encounter non-existent—that is, it is not possible to know what the other has to say without engaging with them. In essence, the conditional hospitality that underscores an educative relationship is a necessary and enabling condition for education to occur. It is necessary in the sense that there will not be an educative encounter without any form of human engagement. Likewise, if humans do not engage they will not enable an encounter to unfold where humans can open themselves up to listening and engaging with one another’s contending points of views. If the latter happens, the chances of human co-existence, cooperation and peace will be impossible. The Derridian idea of temporary visitation rights is apposite for ongoing educative relations in the sense that people can agree to engage in an encounter and to remain in the encounter for as long as they are persuaded by one another’s reasons. Temporary visitation rights at least grant one an opportunity for engagement with the other, and the possibility of the encounter to be constituted by reasons, irrespective of how unreasonable or irreconcilable others’ reasons might at first appear. It is in this sense that an interrupted conditional hospitality offers a way for educative human relations to persist with the possibility that one can be persuaded by the reasons of others. Such a situation would render the educative encounter highly cosmopolitan and enduring—that is, the possibility that respect, responsibility and peaceful human co-existence and co-operation would be there for as long as the likelihood remains for humans to engage irrespective of their differences. The question arises: should educational human encounters remain open for further reflection in the face of harshness and intolerance? This brings me to Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness.
Educative Encounters and Forgiveness We agree with Derrida (2010, p. 32) that forgiveness is a human act of repentance in the face of the impossible. Here he refers to “unforgivable,” monstrous acts such as harsh crimes against humanity that are almost impossible to forgive, yet, forgiveable as has been the case in South Africa in terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC provided a space for perpetrators of acts of apartheid to be forgiven by those against whom acts of violence were perpetrated. The point about forgiveness is that human beings should consider new encounters on the
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basis of new re-beginnings. A society filled with animosity and hatred for one another cannot live respectfully, responsibly and peacefully. Hence, forgiveness ought to be permitted and accepted as a way through which new human encounters and by implication educative relationships can be harnessed, as in the case of South Africa. In Derrida’s (2010, p. 32) words: Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.
Of course, apartheid, like other crimes against humanity, is “unforgiveable.” Yet, the possibility is there for the crime to be forgiven despite the perpetrator of the crime facing an indictment or possible perusal before the law (Derrida, 2010, p. 33). My interest in forgiving the unforgiveable is in the possibility that such acts of forgiveness could lead to new beginnings, otherwise human beings would remain in perpetual conflict. The interruption of forgiveness is conditional upon the crime not recurring otherwise re-beginnings would in any case not be possible. If educative encounters were to be curbed from allowing engagements about human injustices, such as heinous crimes against humanity, then the possibility that any new re-beginning might emerge would not be possible. The possibility of a new democratic re-beginning is only there on account of the possibility that humans forgive the unforgivable. The cultivation of a democratic South Africa would not have been possible without forgiveness. In the same way, educative encounters should not be constrained in the sense that engagement should only be with people advancing the cause of human justice. New re-beginnings happen only when all humans—irrespective of whether they were perpetrators or non-perpetrators of crimes against humanity—are willing to engage with one another. If not, our human societies will be perpetually marred by unrest, conflict and violence. Education and the possibility of forgiveness offer humans an opportunity to engage about the cultivation of newly yearned democratic communities. Here, Derrida (2010, p. 38) makes the point that forgiving the unforgiveable is conditional upon the guilty repenting and mending their ways, such that they are permanently changed by a new obligation. If educational encounters were therefore to overcome discord, trauma and paralysis, then such encounters should create conditions whereby the unforgiveable ought to be forgiven. Of course, if peaceful human co-existence is the ultimate goal, then the language of amnesty, reparation and reconciliation cannot escape the possibility of forgiveness. In the same
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way, educative human encounters that envisage moving societies away from torture, genocide, terrorism and crimes against humanity should not avoid the educative potential of forgiveness in the cultivation of our common humanity. Finally, Derrida (2010, p. 55) speaks about “the enigma of the forgiveness of the unforgiveable” in the sense that forgiveness should be unconditional on the grounds that there cannot be a sovereign power that owns it (forgiveness). In other words, one cannot sovereignly decide to have peace and then simultaneously urge to bring the perpetrators of genocide to account for their unjust crimes. Peace ought to grow out of mutual engagement between contending parties. If the latter happens, forgiveness would not be genuine as the possibility is always there that the sovereign might not forgive the unforgiveable. For this reason, Derrida (2010, p. 56) insists that forgiveness be considered a sort of madness which the juridico-political cannot approach. Without going into much detail about the latter claim, it suffices to say that forgiveness ends when the sovereign calls upon the perpetrators to account for their crimes against humanity. What interests us, is Derrida’s call that infinite deliberation about forgiveness in relation to human experiences ought to be given our attention. It is in this regard that, in the next chapter, we examine Seyla Benhabib’s account of cosmopolitanism and how ongoing deliberation offers a way out of the forgiveness predicament.
Summary In this chapter, we have been concerned with the cultivation of human relationships on the basis of an unconditional hospitality. Even if hospitality is temporarily conditional, it ought to be interrupted in order to ensure unconditionality as far as humans’ right to temporary refuge is concerned. One way of interrupting a conditional hospitality is through the act of forgiveness which, following Derrida (2010), implies forgiving the unforgiveable. If human relationships can be underscored by such an act of interruption, the possibility for unconditional hospitality within educative human encounters is always possible—and the possibility of cosmopolitan hospitality will most poignantly be nurtured.
References Derrida, J. (2010). On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness (M. Dooley & M. Hughes, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
CHAPTER 3
Cosmopolitan Norms and the Art of Deliberation: Beyond Forgiveness
Abstract In this chapter, we use Seyla Benhabib’s understanding of universalism that centres difference in conceptualising cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, following Benhabib, is more plausible if it invokes a conceptualisation of universalism that privileges subjectivities in the constitution of our individual and collective autonomy as humans. In this chapter, we contend that a difference-based notion of cosmopolitanism can guide democratic iterations underscored by communicative freedom. We specifically draw on Seyla Benhabib’s thoughts on democratic iterations to show how cosmopolitan human encounters might be extended further. Her view of democratic iterations is apposite to the cultivation of a cosmopolitanism-in-becoming in the sense that, as we shall show, iterations within themselves are both democratic and deliberative acts of human engagement—those acts of engagement that seem to be commensurate with cosmopolitan norms of human engagement. Keywords Universalism • Difference • Cosmopolitanism • Subjectivities • Individual • Collective autonomy • Humans • Democratic iterations • Communicative freedom • Iterations • Cosmopolitanism-in-becoming • Human engagement
© The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2_3
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Introduction If we were to recap the arguments in the previous two chapters, at least two aspects emerge: firstly, cosmopolitan human encounters are not possible without the condition of rationality; and secondly, any human encounter will remain in becoming if a condition of unconditional hospitality were to be aspired. In this chapter, we draw on Seyla Benhabib’s thoughts on democratic iterations to show how cosmopolitan human encounters might be extended further. Her view of democratic iterations is apposite to the cultivation of a cosmopolitanism-in-becoming in the sense that, as we shall show, iterations within themselves are both democratic and deliberative acts of human engagement—those acts of engagement that seem to be commensurate with cosmopolitan norms of human engagement. If we were to present our argument developed thus far in defence of a kosmou politès or world citizen, then we have two distinctive and interrelated forms of human actions: the three Rs—reason, response and respect (Nussbaum, 2010); and, the three Ds—dialogue, deed and differ (Derrida, 2010). Together the three Rs and the three Ds offer an account of a world citizen who invariably finds himself or herself engaged in dialogue through reasoning: in deed (action), through being responsible towards all others; and in respect, in an atmosphere of difference. Put differently, cosmopolitanism is an educative encounter of human engagement underscored by the reasons people proffer in an atmosphere of respect for difference, and acting their responsibility towards all humans and non-humans (we would say) as they endeavour to immerse themselves as citizens of the world. What keeps them together in a form of human engagement—that is, what makes them liable to continue with their encounter(s) is the act of deliberative iterations that we shall now examine in relation to the seminal thoughts of Seyla Benhabib.
Towards a Difference-grounded Cosmopolitanism Through Democratic Iterations In this chapter, we contend that cosmopolitan education must necessarily start with and centre differences that reside in otherness other than be committed to an absolutist transcendent conception of cosmopolitanism that demands every society to conform to allegedly universal and objective cosmopolitan norms. By demanding generally unconditional conformism to its ostensible objective universalism, a transcendent or deontological
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cosmopolitan universalism extinguishes the normativity of subjectivities as fundamental individuating elements that cannot be decoupled from an ideal respect of human equality and recognition of being human. Given this background, in this chapter we argue, using Seyla Benhabib’s difference-grounded cosmopolitan universalism that, unless higher education advances such a cosmopolitanism of difference, it risks marginalising and de-problematising the individuating of educational encounters. In this chapter we therefore argue for the role of a difference-grounded cosmopolitanism in conceptualising educational aims and goals, in the choice of curriculum content, and in the application of teaching and learning methods, because these aspects of education are founded on social visions and a presupposed conception of human nature. A concrete operation of the elements that constitute human nature is guided by subjective factors. While the chapter defends the centrality of difference in cosmopolitanism, it also argues that a cosmopolitanism of difference does not necessarily outlaw the objective, nor can a cosmopolitanism of difference be decoupled from objectivity. Other than being a choice between objective or subjective, a cosmopolitanism of difference is rather—in principle—a complement of both concepts. This brings us to an elucidation of what is central to cosmopolitan action.
Democratic Iterations Revisited Due to global interconnectedness as well as a normative necessity, human interaction or engagement or encounter has broadened rapidly. Questions of human equality are no longer abstract; actual people now make actual demands and place a moral obligation on both individual and collective exercise of agency. This interconnection has propelled the establishment of legal structures to codify the enforcement cosmopolitan norms. However, such drives are trans-local as new norms, rules and laws regarding human relations across borders. Benhabib (2011, p. 112) refers to such processes whereby laws migrate “across state boundaries and institutional jurisdictions, whether institutionalized or popular [as] democratic iterations.” For Benhabib (2011, p. 112), Democratic iterations are processes of linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-in-transformation—invocations that are also revocations. Through such iterative acts a democratic people, considering itself bound by
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certain guiding norms and principles, reappropriates and reinterprets these, thus showing itself to be not only subject to the laws but also their author.
She further holds: [D]emocratic iterations are processes of legitimation not of justification. They stand in the same relationship to normative discourses of justification as theories of democracy stand to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice; that is, theories of democracy are concerned with legitimacy as distinguished from theories which consider justice. (Benhabib, 2011, p. 246)
The necessity of a deliberative universalism lies in the fact that it seeks to ground universal norms in the concrete situatedness of people and is cognisant that “even the most cosmopolitan norms, such as human rights, require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples” (Benhabib, 2011, p. 118). Put differently, cosmopolitan norms are not merely abstract transcendent ideals that must be imposed on any people in complete disregard of the situationality of the people. In a diverse context therefore deliberative cosmopolitanism has to take cognisance of the necessity for interpreting and contesting universalist norms to be intelligible in the context of people’s diversity and the hegemony of the mainstream culture embedding the curriculum that may in principle necessarily require the alienation of the other from their situatedness in order to engage in education.
Democratic Iterations and Otherness: Criticisms Can the substance of democratic iterations be universalised, or are we stuck with permanent relativism? Benhabib responds to the alleged or likely conflict between cosmopolitan norms and human rights norms on the one hand, and localised interests of a people apparently due to the Western heritage of such norms on the other (Benhabib, 2011, p. 114). Benhabib (2011, p. 114) holds that this is due to a “philosophical conflation of genesis and validity” of these norms, which is to say that issues pertaining to “the conditions of origin of a norm” are different from issues about the validity of the norms. What Benhabib insinuates here is that despite cultures of the world being as diverse as they are, the substance of human rights and cosmopolitan norms—although developed to a large extent by one culture across the world—are still valid with a normative
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legitimacy over all humanity, not on the basis of their source of origin, but rather on account of their inherent normative validity. This implies that there are bound to be differences across cultures and societies in the enactment of abstract moral principles of cosmopolitanism given the concreteness of human societies. However, such variation ought not to extend to positions that deny the relevance of cosmopolitan ideals. The same argument may extend to possible criticisms of the concept of democratic iterations, which in principle takes into account articulations of otherness, as being a tool for preserving oppression of minorities (by their own members and institutions) and oppressed groups in a community of women, for instance, apparently on the basis that their vernacularisation of being human is inevitably bound to be different from those of others.
Communicative Freedom as an “Objective” Unconditional Demand for Iterations A major potential criticism to cosmopolitan universalism that is grounded in difference is that such a universalism promotes moral relativism, ultimately insulating the way of life in one society from external criticism. A potential critic would contend that such insulation only cements the internal oppressive inequalities by the dominant people of that particular society. Benhabib holds,“[d]emocratic iterations are not concerned with the question, which norms are valid for human beings at all times and in all places?” but rather, with questions such as: In view of our moral, political and constitutional commitments as a people, our international obligations to human rights treaties and documents, what collective decisions can we reach which would be deemed both just and legitimate? Since democratic iterations seek to achieve an all-inclusive democratic justice, they mediate between a collectivity’s constitutional and institutional responsibilities, and the context-transcending universal claims of human rights and justice to which such a collectivity ought to be equally committed. (Benhabib, 2011, p. 152)
It is apparent that Benhabib (2011) is refraining from ending up with a Kantian transcendent absolutist conception of human rights and cosmopolitan norms that is not responsive to nor takes into consideration the contextuality of a collectivity. However, as the primary basis for democratic iterative deliberations, Benhabib (2011) at the same time takes into
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consideration the shared political and constitutional commitments people have as well as people’s obligations to human rights, which would be acceptable to the concerned moral agents. In this context, Benhabib (2011) assumes that such human rights documents, treaties and constitutions are given or that they are not informed by certain minimal absolute traits of being human. It is difficult to imagine how such deliberations could be possible without a grounded shared assumption about certain minimal fundamentals in conceptions of human nature. The above criticism is consistent with Benhabib’s (2011) own two positions. Firstly, the core of her discursive universalism contends that humanity across the world needs to be understood as both general others and concrete others (Benhabib, 2011, p. 68). The generalised other moral standpoint, which Benhabib (2011) criticises for hiding the individuating peculiarities of being human and which therefore should not be excluded from the normative conceptualisation of citizenship, is grounded in the commonalities that a diverse humanity has (Benhabib, 2011, p. 69). Her argument is not that the moral standpoint of general otherness is normatively invalid in accounting for human equality, but rather that this standpoint is inadequate and incomplete to single-handedly account for what it is to be human because it marginalises differences that host individuation, which the general other standpoint necessarily marginalises. Put differently, the commonalities of being human are neither dispensable nor inhibitive in accounting for differences that otherness hosts. Secondly, Benhabib’s own notion of “right to have rights” (Benhabib, 2011, p. 9) as a fundamental right for humanity attests to the notion that deliberations must still occur in a presupposed background context of certain conceded fundamental attributes of being human. The right to have rights is absolute and inseparable from the recognition of human dignity that each human being has. Benhabib further argues that being a moral person “capable of communicative freedom” is what it means to be a human being. And, a human has— [A] fundamental right to have rights. In order to exercise communicative freedom, your capacity for embedded agency needs to be respected. You need to be recognized as a member of an organized human community in which your words and acts situate you within a social space of interaction
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and communication. You have a ‘right’, that is, a moral claim to be recognized by others as ‘a rights-bearing person’, entitled to a legally instituted schedule of rights. (Benhabib, 2011, pp. 68–69)
Thus, among the major assumptions for a deliberative encounter is the fact that one must respect not only the other’s capacity for agency, but also the product of the exercise of the capacity of the other, that is, the substance of the self-definition and self-articulation of the other. One infers that the assumption of the “absoluteness” of the right to have rights lies in the fact that it is an enabler of self-definition, which in principle is rooted in and expresses the peculiarity of the differences that constitute otherness. One can also further glean that in educational encounters not only does otherness have a right to difference, but it is in the interest of the other as well as of everybody that in their educational encounters there be a readiness to embrace and understand what makes the other other. The goal may not necessarily be that the rest of the people must approve or legitimate the perspectives of the other. They may not agree with the substance of otherness. However, as justificatory processes, deliberative processes ensure that there is a guarantee even from those who strongly disagree with the substance of the position of the other, that such positions have not been arrived at coercively. In other words, recognising otherness should not contain within it the capacity to accommodate indifference to the suppression of the other on the basis of accommodating the contextuality of the other. There are therefore two binding double-edged normative obligations in an encounter with otherness. The first obligation is that the other is not coerced to conform to dominant conventional perspectives. Secondly, in an encounter with otherness, each has an obligation to ensure that by tolerating otherness, one is not being indifferent and in material support for oppressive systems. Determination of all this is largely dependent on non-subjective guarantees that in the wider community and in the micro- communities of the other, the right to have rights, which is communicative freedom, is assured and never compromised. In other words, respect for otherness is inextricably tied to the precondition for communicative freedom. As such, democratic iterations neither promote indifference towards others nor perpetuate oppression within groups and sub-groups of others.
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Implications of Democratic Iterations for Higher Education What affects the actualisation of human potentialities for an individual today has multiple geographical sources. Furthermore, the modern globalised world requires of an individual to cultivate skills and possess knowledge about others outside such an individual’s geographical situatedness, since modern life has put all humanity in an involuntary intricate web of necessary and inevitable mutual dependence. This is what necessitates a cultivation of cosmopolitan skills in order to ensure encounters with the other that are rooted in human dignity. Given the diversity and complexity of global cultures and outlooks, what amounts to respecting the dignity and indeed the humanness of the other is not reducible to generic and abstract duties one owes a generic transcendent self. Since being human is ultimately about being an individual, which entails paramountcy of the individuating differences as being indispensable in recognition of the equality and moral worth of every human being, education must embrace and pursue a form of cosmopolitanism that centres difference. Since a cultivation of cosmopolitan skills is among the major ends of education today, difference cannot be dismissed. The outstanding work that remains is determining the form of cosmopolitanism whose skills and capacities modern education ought to develop in learners. A cosmopolitanism that centres difference in its configuration of universalism is crucial in this modern culturally complex and diverse world. There is a strong temptation to conceive cosmopolitanism as being reducible to only the commonalities that human beings share and, as such, to assume that education today should aim at cultivating. However, such approaches to education serve to de-problematise the alienation of the other “subaltern” perspectives in education and knowledge production, leaving the designing of a global future permanently antagonistic to other perspectives only on account of their otherness. Ultimately, this only serves to trivialise and undermine the normativity of the subjectivities of the other people outside the mainstream. Being educated becomes synonymous with a mainstream culture whose acquisition necessarily alienates otherness and localness (Giroux, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1995). The first implication of a difference-grounded cosmopolitanism for higher education therefore pertains to the process of conceptualising assumed aims of education. A deliberative cosmopolitanism that is sensitive to individuating difference to be a concrete human being, despite
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there being some generic attributes characteristic of all human beings. Since fully recognising people as concrete human beings worthy of respect and possessing an unqualified dignity cannot be separated from recognising the elements of individuation or collective situatedness, there are bound to be a very wide range of what human beings in an educational encounter value as being inseparable from their concreteness. This necessitates having deliberation in order to ensure encounters recognise the normativity of difference. Aims of education have a particular underlying assumption of human nature. However, such an underlying assumption of human nature ought to not be understood as being incontestable, especially in its concrete forms. It is therefore imperative that educational aims must take into consideration the different conceptions of what it means to be human in the crafting of educational aims. If, for instance, educational aims are exclusively grounded on a human nature conception that is essentially individual- centric and has a static absolute model of a transcendent self as the epitome of such a notion of education, the focus of such an education would inevitably actively de-emphasise responsibilities of collective life as being inherently inimical to the project of an “authentic” autonomous, almost self-sufficient, individual. Furthermore, there would be a strong temptation to regard collectivity responsibilities as being characteristically antagonistic to the autonomous individual project that such a notion of education is apparently meant to focus on exclusively. However, being human and having ultimate respect for human dignity do not necessitate an exclusive paramountcy of individual autonomy. There are alternative conceptualisations of being an individual that regard autonomy neither as exclusive of nor as paramount to a relational being. The two ideals for some moral perspectives are complementary and not in competition with one another so that none can single-handedly account for what it means to be a concrete human being. A conception of what it is to be human must also necessarily be grounded in a cosmopolitan universalism of difference; hence, it must be deliberative because irrespective of aims, education exists in a particular social context and pursues a particular social vision (Giroux, 2004), which is generally culturally situated, or privileges the concrete moral perspectives of a particular culture. Unless a cosmopolitan education is grounded in difference, it risks being exclusive other than inclusive. A given social vision is largely anchored in the shared public culture of a people, and this applies to concrete democratic cultures and institutions of democratic
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societies (Kymlicka, 2002). Social visions are not objective but are largely shaped by a shared culture, language and historical experiences of the collectivity; yet, such social visions are nevertheless substantially constitutive of educational aims. Although the quest of an ideal democratic education is to build an education not grounded in such subjective elements, in both practice and principle, it is arguably impossible to establish such an education. This is because such education embeds partiality since the idea of an actual detached non-situated transcendent being is generally practically unattainable as concrete human beings are always situated (Code, 2012; Held, 2006). Ultimately, a cosmopolitan education whose universalism is not grounded in difference but rather serves to circumvent and eliminate difference only serves exclusion and cannot serve the demands of respecting human equality despite the education being ostensibly championed as impartial and objective. It is, therefore, imperative that crafting of the aims of higher education should be deliberative and considering, not tokenistic but critical aspects of otherness as valid alternative approaches to being and as safeguards that regulate the hegemony of mainstream perspectives rendering such perspectives exclusive rather than inclusively so. Besides educational aims or goals, pedagogical approaches too are grounded in a particular conception of human nature as well as being informed by the situatedness of the collectivity. Aspects of situatedness, such as public culture, thin as it may be, dominant social visions, and historical experiences of a given society cannot be divorced from the commonly preferred pedagogical experiences in an educational institution. While such aspects could serve to help make the education more meaningful, on the other hand they have profound potential to prevent the interrogation of certain attitudes, practices and norms constituting the mainstream culture of the school and informing the nature and choice of pedagogical experiences. Teaching and learning experiences associated with the mainstream culture will tend to both exclude others as well as prevent learners from transcending the contextuality. A difference-grounded universalism will always remind a teacher that there are alternative approaches to teaching and learning. More importantly, such a cosmopolitanism will incessantly urge the teacher to choose or devise teaching and learning experiences that are inclusive, that enable the use of uncommon methodologies, which nevertheless resonate with and critically engage other learners whose background is not that of the dominant culture that shapes the mainstream culture of the school. For
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instance, whereas some cultural backgrounds value blunt expression of one’s feelings and attitudes towards others, other cultural backgrounds tend to be not so blunt in expressing one’s feelings even when one is offended. Whereas some contexts would value competition among learners to have the best learner stand out over the rest and hence prize teaching methods that are largely centred on the independent individual, others have a background of teamwork and collaboration where the welfare of the other members in the community is also weighty in the determination of one’s success. A deliberative cosmopolitanism that is grounded in difference will also be cognisant of the existence of alternative knowledge sources and knowledge- creation processes. Such a cosmopolitanism, cognisant of diverse ways of being human and of human interests is as diverse as it is contrastive at times, actively creating room for the inclusion of subaltern or indigenous epistemologies in educational experiences. The awareness that an absolutely impartial education is unattainable in practice and that education is by nature situated in people’s experiences; hence, a cosmopolitanism that is deliberative, demands that other forms of knowledge and other forms of knowing be centred on academic inquiry because the mainstream knowledge modern education pursues is informed by and retains the hegemony of economically and globally dominant perspectives.
Summary Employing Seyla Benhabib’s universalism that centres difference on a conceptualisation of cosmopolitan norms, this chapter has argued that such an idea of cosmopolitanism is better placed to help avert the debilitating effects of the hegemony that constitutes understandings of cosmopolitanism grounded in the commonalities of human nature only in a significant way. Unless the conceptualisation of universalism privileges subjectivities, which are also the primary elements in the constitution of individuality, the ensuing cosmopolitan educational encounters will deny recognition of what makes the other human, thereby effectively denying the other equality. This chapter has therefore demanded that the crucial educational matters of goal setting, choice of curriculum content and pedagogy must be informed by a difference-rooted cosmopolitan universalism to make education inclusive. This does not undermine or discard the place of objective moral claims in normative configurations of cosmopolitan encounters. Rather, the chapter has showed that a difference-based cosmopolitanism is
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intricately bound in a complementary relationship with moral principles grounded in human commonalities, and that it is not a choice of one over the other. Following Benhabib (2011), the chapter has recognised the potential of democratic iterations slipping into defences for oppressive systems on account of the centrality of social contextuality. However, iterations are only legitimate if the background context of their occurrence is characterised by communicative freedom, the right to have rights.
References Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity: Human rights in turbulent times. Cambridge: Polity. Code, L. (2012). Taking subjectivity into account. In C. W. Ruitenberg & D. C. Phillips (Eds.), Education, culture and epistemological diversity: Mapping a disputed terrain (pp. 85–100). Dordrecht: Springer. Derrida, J. (2010). On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness (M. Dooley & M. Hughes, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge. Giroux, H. A. (2004). Critical pedagogy and the postmodern/modern divide: Towards a pedagogy of democratization. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31(1), 31–47. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Politics in the vernacular: Nationalism, multiculturalism and citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy need the humanities. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
CHAPTER 4
Rooted Cosmopolitan Education
Abstract In this chapter, we discuss the notion of inclusive cosmopolitanism as espoused by Kwame A. Appiah. The central theme of Appiah’s cosmopolitanism is the idea of rooted cosmopolitanism. Rooted cosmopolitanism is grounded in the distinction Appiah draws between moral and ethical duties. On the one hand, moral duties pertain to the impartiality in the generally thin relations that are political in nature and governed by such things as distributive schemes of a society. Such duties could either be in reference to local or global people. Ethical duties, on the other hand, pertain to the realm of individual commitments grounded in the nature of the individual as an embedded autonomous choice- making being about what constitutes the good life. The ethical person is an embedded being in a complex set of different personal relationships. Though individuals differently value the social-cultural context of their embedded-ness, elements of such a context are however, indispensable in the expression and concreteness of the autonomy of the individual. In this chapter, we contend that education informed by rooted cosmopolitanism must necessarily be responsive to the sources of individual rootedness for different people across the world. Keywords Inclusive cosmopolitanism • Rooted cosmopolitanism • Moral • Ethical duties • Autonomous choice-making • Relationships • Autonomy • Individual rootedness
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Introduction In this chapter, we discuss the notion of inclusive cosmopolitanism as espoused by Kwame A. Appiah. The central theme of Appiah’s cosmopolitanism is the idea of rooted cosmopolitanism, which is grounded in the distinction Appiah draws between moral and ethical duties. On the one hand, moral duties pertain to the impartiality in the generally thin relations that are political in nature governed by such things as distributive schemes of a society. The beneficiaries of such duties could be either local or global people. Ethical duties, on the other hand, pertain to the realm of individual commitments grounded in the nature of the individual as a socially embedded autonomous choice-making being about what constitutes the good life. The ethical person is a being embedded in social contexts in a complex set of different personal relationships the individual subjectively values; yet, such valuation is what expresses and concretises the autonomy of the individual. In this chapter, we contend that education informed by rooted cosmopolitanism must necessarily be responsive to the sources of individual rootedness for different people across the world. Since sources of rootedness are relational and therefore vary across global communities, it is imperative that in educational encounters, aspirations for rooted cosmopolitanism must be characteristically deliberative in order to avoid mere conjectures or projections as to what constitutes the rootedness of the other. The necessity for centring deliberation in encounters of difference in educational domains entails making educational curriculums aimed at achieving the modern global citizen, considering local and indigenous epistemologies, and utilising local languages as a means of instruction in education grounded in the rootedness of people. To achieve an inclusive cosmopolitan education, the deliberation with otherness— besides identifying and being responsive to the rootedness of otherness— must be connected with the rootedness to local communities.
The Problem with Radical Cosmopolitanism As the previous chapter has shown, the possibility of humanity across the world to have a sense of global community has exerted pressure on the people of the world to find ways of ensuring forms of engagement among said people with a sense of respect and consistent with human equality. Given the characteristically diverse and, at times, contrasting cultures of peoples of the world, the prevalent dominant approach to achieving global
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citizenship has been one of centring only what is common about humanity and simultaneously extinguishing differences across global peoples as an obstacle in the conceptualisation of global citizenship. The ultimate result of this approach is that the relevant cosmopolitanism, which is compatible with this approach, has predominantly been, a neo-Kantian type of moral universalism that assigns normative value only to objective aspects of being and regards subjectivity as unworthy of being constitutive of normativity. As Benhabib (1992, p. 161) observes, even most political philosophy theories from the Lockean and Hobbesean classical traditions to Rawls, have retained and centred the concept of commonality. Education as one of the most effective tools for social transformation and cultivating citizenship has ultimately embraced and is now largely governed by a universalism that emphasises commonality in educational encounters, apparently equipping learners with skills and giving them a capacity with which to face the global world of complex diversities. In principle, one would deduce that modern education serves to give learners skills that will help them identify and circumvent difference in the other of the world they will meet. Such education largely equips learners with skills to build their encounters with the other on the basis of shared commonality only. For so long theorists have been placing confidence in the Kantian universalism of a kingdom of transcendent selves whose relationships are primarily and exclusively based on shared rational capacities. Apparently, the only interests that matter for such selves are those interests that are steeped in reason. However, such a conception of the moral subject is problematic, especially in the context of an actually interconnected people of the world today. As Appiah holds, “an ideology can be staunchly supranational and also staunchly illiberal” and such moral universalism also has the capacity to “carry a uniformitarian agenda. Especially in their ruthlessly utopian varieties, universalisms can be malignant indeed” (Appiah, 2005, p. 220). The implication one draws, is that conceptualisations of universalism have potential to hide, retain and perpetuate certain forms of inequalities and imbalances in its aspiration to promote objectivity. Cosmopolitanisms that marginalise difference as being inherently antithetical to universalism are apparently motivated by the position that all human beings are equal because the human being is the ultimate unit of moral concern. Therefore, it is only the objective equalities and interests people have that are of normative concern, and not all subjectivities ought to be included in normative conceptualisations of such things as citizenship, as subjectivities are morally arbitrary. One would refer to such a form
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of cosmopolitanism as radical cosmopolitanism. The central postulation of radical cosmopolitanism is that human equality places binding duties of impartiality on all people of the world where any other subjectivities rooted in community, nation and personality, are morally arbitrary, and universalistic duties towards the people of the world should not be restricted by duties generated by particularistic commitments (Gorski, 2012; Merry, 2009; Nili, 2015). However, holding that since human beings are equal only on the basis of shared commonalities and hence must treat each other with equal concern, simultaneously discounting the normativity of situatedness, commits a category mistake. The category mistake arises in that such an “invocation of moral equality is based on an illicit transposition from politics to persons, a related error—which appears in both the realm of the personal and that of the political—is to assume that ‘equal’ means ‘identical’” (Appiah, 2005, p. 228). According to Appiah (2005) the category mistake of radical cosmopolitanism is that morality does not demand equal or impartial treatment of all people, but rather equality “denotes a regulative ideal for political, not personal, conduct. We go wrong when we conflate personal and political ideals, and, in particular, when we assume that, because there are connections between the two, they are the same” (Appiah, 2005, p. 230). Appiah clarifies the distinction between morality and ethics on the basis that radical cosmopolitanism conflates the two concepts. For Appiah— [E]thical concerns and constraints arise from my individuality; moral ones arise from my personhood. Ethical ones govern how I behave toward people with whom I have a thick relationship—and tend to be more demanding the thicker that relationship is. (Appiah, 2005, p. 232)
With respect to duties or obligations, Appiah draws a distinction between morality and ethics where the moral pertains to humanity in general, that is “thin relations, which we have with a stranger, and which are stipulatively entailed by a shared humanity” (Appiah, 2005, p. 231) while ethical duties pertain to the “thick relations—invoke a community founded in a shared past or collective memory” (Appiah, 2005, p. 230). Contrary to the central claims of radical impartiality that necessarily dismiss individual and communal subjectivities rooted in situatedness as normatively unworthy and counter-equalitarian, for Appiah (2005, p. 231), “our projects—and, with them, our sense of what it is to live well—involve creating a life out of materials and circumstances that we have been given;
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this involves developing an identity, enmeshed in larger, collective narratives but not exhausted by them.” For Appiah, on the one hand, the interests of the realm of morality pertain to “social justice—which is to say, of the well-ordered society, the just state, the ideal of liberal governance” while, on the other hand, the realm of the ethical person by contrast encompasses the individual “as an embedded self with thick relations to others” (Appiah, 2005, p. 231). Distinctively, for Appiah (2005), the interests that are constitutive of the ethical self are those of specific, encumbered human beings who are members of particular communities. To say that one creates a life is to entail that one creates “a life out of the materials that history has given you. An identity is always articulated through concepts (and practices) made available to you by religion, society, school, and state, mediated by family, peers, friends” (Appiah, 2005, p. 231). What is remarkable about Appiah’s conceptualisation of impartiality and its duties is that he does not justify duties of partiality in a framework of priority of duties, where duties generated from private commitments are only validated by an initial performance and prioritisation of universal duties. Rather, Appiah holds that these two sets of duties cannot and need not be conditioned on each other nor put in a hierarchy because they are characteristically different in nature, motivation and object. The category mistake is committed when attributes of duties pertaining to the moral are required to apply to the ethical. In other words, while it is imperative that political and public institutions in a democratic society place unvarying obligations and benefits on every citizen, the ethical realm—which is a realm of personal projects and interests—is not regulated by the norms and duties that regulate public life. As he holds— What’s increasingly clear, I hope, is that we’re omitting information when we employ the term ‘obligation’ indifferently to designate moral and ethical oughts. Moral judgments provide reasons for action. But ethical ones provide reasons, too—just reasons of a different order, because they are relative to an agent’s identity set, to our individuality. (Appiah, 2005, p. 235)
Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Value of Difference from Situatedness For Appiah (2005, p. 222), sound cosmopolitanism must value human life in general while simultaneously valuing the contextualised human lives the people have embraced and developed for themselves in their communities.
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While such cosmopolitanism ought not to “reflexively celebrate human difference” it, however, “cannot be indifferent to the challenge of engaging with [difference]” (Appiah, 2005, p. 222). There is a distinctiveness and worth of the subjectivities that constitute being a concrete other than in being only a general human person. This is why Appiah (2005, p. 227) contends that “particularised goods which are the basis of partiality in society have intrinsic worth yet at the same time such a worth is of a different category.” This is not in the same sense as in an egalitarian distribution of wealth. For him, such goods, which pertain to the “evaluative affect are ‘nontransferable’ … Friendship is different from wealth. The liberal egalitarian may distribute all his wealth to those who do not have it, but may not distribute his friends to the friendless)” (Appiah, 2005, p. 227). For Appiah, cosmopolitanism ought not necessarily be about sifting out the subjectivities that constitute being a concrete individual in order to remain with only the objective universal relationships and the duties they generate. Rather, for Appiah, cosmopolitanism must centre on the rootedness of the individual and his or her local situatedness as indispensable elements constituting personhood or being a human person. Rooted cosmopolitanism therefore “is a composite project, a negotiation between disparate tasks. Generally speaking, associative duties can be categorized as ethical rather than moral” (Appiah, 2005, p. 232). [Associative duties] involve duties to yourself … insofar as they reflect your commitment to living a certain kind of life; they involve duties to an ethical community … insofar as they reflect your participation in them, the fact that you enjoy thick relations with certain people through your identities. (Appiah, 2005, p. 232)
What is even more pertinent for Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism is that the individual, who is the ultimate unit of moral concern, is not a detached being with abstract relationships to all humanity but is rather embedded in a situated context. As Meyers (2005) observes, the self is not only unitary but also relational. As such the exercise of autonomy does not necessarily entail that one be outlandish but rather that through interpersonal relations, “people express their values, needs, interests, and so forth in fashioning their relationships” and that they “act autonomously in maintaining these ties” (Meyers, 2005, p. 38). Therefore, the necessity for cosmopolitanism to encompass the aspects of the rootedness of the individual lies in the domain of thick relations that generate special obligations,
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and is motivationally sensitive in just this way: it depends upon specific norms that determine the ethical significance of various relational facts. Conduct that is shaped by ethical concerns—by our membership in an ethical community, that is, by aspects of our collective identities—is part of what gives content to those ethical relations, that ethical community, that identity. Ethical obligation is internal to the identity. Who you are is constituted, in part, by what you care about; to cease to care about those things would be to cease to be the sort of person you are. Since an ethical community is constituted in part by special responsibilities that obtain among its members. If nobody felt such special responsibilities, there would be no such community, no such demands. In the realm of the ethical, one can only get an “ought” from an “is” (Appiah, 2005, p. 236). The most pertinent thing about this position, as others also argue (see Held, 2006; MacIntyre, 2002; Taylor, 2003), is that the individual human being who is the ultimate unit of moral concern, is both a rational and dependent being. The linguistic, cultural, historical and geographical elements that constitute embeddedness are therefore cardinal if we are to have a comprehensive account of normativity. The implication for the centrality of the aspects of social embeddedness in cosmopolitanism places demands on the (re)imagination of education in the domains of knowledge selection and valuation and on the form of citizenship the education must cultivate. Put differently, cosmopolitan education must actively centre and engage the different sources of being a concrete individual.
Experiences that Matter in Education The plausibility of a cosmopolitanism that actively centres the individual’s aspects of rootedness has a profound implication for education. The major implication is that cosmopolitan education, which equips the learner for the modern world must take into account both the commonalities humanity has as well as the definitive differences the people of the world have. Today, much of the education globally has assumptions about human interests that are deemed to be objective and primary. However, despite the dominance of such educational frameworks, the challenge is that local sources of being an individual and a collectivity are marginalised on the basis of their otherness. As Yosso (2005, p. 73) contends, in a culturally diverse setup as the global one, any normative discourse of global or social justice that fails to centre the differences that constitute “other” people’s experiences—hence, in principle muting the voice of others—effectively
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fails the justice project. For Yosso (2005, p. 74), schools have a contradictory nature in that their “structures, practices, and discourses” usually marginalise others, on the one hand, while they still retain “the potential to emancipate and empower” in the context of a dominant ideology, on the other. A cosmopolitanism in education that necessarily demands muting the sources of rootedness and of active articulation of otherness is in principle in material co-operation with the marginalisation capacity of a school. The hegemonic neo-Kantian conception of cosmopolitanism that also inheres within modern education emphasises and recognises “objective” commonalities that people have and arguably necessarily de-emphasises rootedness. In much of Africa, the legacy of colonialism (itself informed by essentialist and radically impartial cosmopolitanism) together with the need to integrate into and compete in the indispensable global order that significantly distributes opportunities for individuals as well as nations, has led to the dominance of epistemologies and knowledge construction processes that necessarily alienate indigeneity and localness (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015), which are crucial sources of rootedness. Modern education retains and perpetuates malignity of sources of rootedness and is embedded [In] books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday. (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243)
As García and Guerra (2004, p. 162) also hold, human beings are embedded and operate in a cultural context, while the school, the curriculum as well as textbooks are mainstreamed and are not impartial. What complicates matters is that the culture that undergirds global cosmopolitanism is generally alien to and alienates elements of the rootedness of most individuals among the peoples of the world. The positivistic orientation of modern education and the human sciences models in knowledge construction and legitimation of knowledge in natural scientific inquiry, presupposes that what makes one a concrete human being is objective and that all human behaviour is predictable and dictated by manipulable principles (Code, 2012, p. 88). Modern education is premised on the assumption that pure knowledge, which apparently pertains to the objective alone and is ostensibly value-neutral, must be independent of the rootedness of
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the individual or community and should therefore “transcend the particularities of experience to achieve purity” (Code, 2012, p. 88). For such cosmopolitan education, subjectivity is not part pure knowledge (Code, 2012, p. 88). As a result, this entails that, in order to be educated for instance, the education and the school attach prestige to global languages, through active punitive discouragement of the use of learners’ mother tongue, which is regarded as lacking the capacity to make one achieve social mobility (Bunyi, 2005; Kamwendo, 2010; Probyn, 2005). Even in research regarding cosmopolitan citizenship, or global citizenship, non-indigenous or non-conventional perspectives are scarcely represented, as the discourse is largely dominated by perspectives and experiences of most Western developed nations (Parmenter, 2011). Looked at differently, rooted cosmopolitanism recognises that in a democratic local or global society today, the individual is enmeshed in forms of co-operation and solidarity that are both social and political in nature. According to Ben-Porath (2012), the individual human being participates in normatively valuable institutional solidarity on the one hand, and socio-cultural forms of solidarity on the other. Institutional solidarity is political in nature and is based on relations the individual has with others that are grounded in the shared political institutions, such as a common constitution and political processes for collective will-formation. On the other hand, and simultaneously, the individual is in a form of shared fate that is based on common aspects of language, public culture and history, among others. These two forms of solidarity mutually reinforce each other and are distinctive. Ben-Porath therefore calls for an education that converges the two aspects of being a citizen where such an education does not promote the impartial political principles governing democratic life, but rather that the education simultaneously “acknowledges and promotes visions of shared histories, struggles, institutions, languages and value commitments” (Ben-Porath, 2012, p. 385). In other words, cosmopolitanism must be rooted, and education must recognise the dual sources of citizenship, the two kinds of fate the individual shares, which ultimately render cosmopolitan citizenship to be both “responsive and aspirational” (Ben-Porath, 2012, p. 385). Education for cosmopolitan citizenship must be responsive to the commitments that arise from the normatively meaningful and identity- constitutive subjectivities of situated shared life: territoriality, language, history, culture and traditions (Ben-Porath, 2012, p. 386). An education for rooted cosmopolitanism is therefore aspirational in that it seeks to
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cultivate capacities and attitudes of an inclusive belonging in the members, inviting and welcoming other perspectives than the mainstream of the global order or the mainstream of the local community only. From the perspective of Ben-Porath, the concept of rooted cosmopolitanism would conceive cosmopolitan citizenship to be both present-looking and future- looking “rooted both in the present, with its social realities, and in the future vision of what society might be like for the next generation” (Ben- Porath, 2012, p. 386). What is worth emphasising here is that such a conception of cosmopolitan citizenship neither ignores nor undermines the present in the quest of attaining a harmonious global co-existence of mutual respect. Gay (2000, p. 111) contends that, given the constitutive nature of situatedness to the individual, thus rendering elements of the subjectivities constituting situatedness cardinal in normative considerations, education must necessarily be responsive to such situatedness where academic success is not compartmentalised from cultural affiliation and personal efficacy because the content and targeted skills of a curriculum have power only when they converge and interact with the learners’ “interests, aspirations, desires, needs, and purposes” (Gay, 2000, p. 111). For education to be consistent with the ideals of rooted cosmopolitanism, it is imperative that such education must be characteristically deliberative. Rootedness cannot be assumed or projected since what constitutes it varies or even contrasts across societies. Another necessity for the demand that rooted cosmopolitan education should be deliberative in nature is that it must bring forward for open scrutiny and inquiry whatever constitutes the rootedness, things which are neither exclusive nor oppressive. This takes care of the most likely criticism that dreads the recognition of rootedness in human relations as being tantamount to preserving and perpetuating the structures and practices of oppression that are commonly embedded in social practices that also vary across societies.
Summary This chapter has defended a cosmopolitanism that normatively necessitates centring in education, the subjectivities of individual rootedness. Appiah’s (2005) conception of rooted cosmopolitanism, which is grounded in the distinctiveness of moral and ethical duties, dismisses grounds for the fears of an incompatibility between the constitutive elements of rootedness, which are indispensable from individual identity.
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Furthermore, the chapter has shown that democratic deliberations in education in conceptualisation as well as in educational policies must centre sources of rootedness as a normative necessity of making the education just and inclusive. Since education cannot in theory and practice be decoupled from situatedness, any cosmopolitan education, which characteristically marginalises the subjectivities of rootedness, in principle denies the other his or her identity as a concrete human being. Such an education materially peddles involuntary assimilation for the people of the world whose rootedness is not consistent with the philosophical outlooks of the mainstream culture underlying modern radical cosmopolitan education. Ultimately, radical cosmopolitan education is a denial of the agency of the other, which ultimately is denying them their humanity.
References Appiah, K. A. (2005). The ethics of identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Ben-Porath, S. (2012). Citizenship as shared fate: Education for membership in a diverse democracy. Educational Theory, 62(4), 381–395. Bunyi, G. W. (2005). Language classroom practices in Kenya. In A. M. Y. Lin & P. W. Martin (Eds.), Decolonisation, globalisation, language-in-education, policy and practice (pp. 131–152). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Code, L. (2012). Taking subjectivity into account. In C. W. Ruitenberg & D. C. Phillips (Eds.), Education, culture and epistemological diversity: Mapping a disputed terrain (pp. 85–100). Dordrecht: Springer. García, S. B., & Guerra, P. L. (2004). Deconstructing deficit thinking: Working with educators to create more equitable learning environments. Education and Urban Society, 36(2), 150–168. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gorski, P. (2012). Rethinking the role of “culture” in educational equity: From cultural competence to equity literacy. Multicultural Perspectives, 18(4), 221–226. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kamwendo, G. (2010). Denigrating the local, glorifying the foreign: Malawian language policies in the era of African Renaissance. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies- Multi-, Inter and Transdisciplinarity, 5(2), 270–282. MacIntyre, A. (2002). Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
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Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2/3), 240–270. Merry, M. S. (2009). Patriotism, history and the legitimate aims of American education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41(4), 378–398. Meyers, D. T. (2005). Decentralizing autonomy: Five faces of selfhood. In J. Christman & J. Anderson (Eds.), Autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: New essays (pp. 27–55). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2015). Decoloniality as the future of Africa. History Compass, 13(10), 485–496. Nili, S. (2015). Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist- cosmopolitan debate. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 18(3), 241–263. Parmenter, L. (2011). Power and place in the discourse of global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3/4), 367–380. Probyn, M. (2005). Language and the struggle to learn: The intersection of classroom realities, language policy, and neocolonial and globalisation discourses in South African schools. In A. M. Y. Lin & P. W. Martin (Eds.), Decolonisation, globalisation, language-in-education, policy and practice (pp. 153–172). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Taylor, C. (2003). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
CHAPTER 5
The Challenge of Culture in Cosmopolitanism
Abstract In this chapter, employing Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitanism, we argue that forms of cosmopolitanism that are preconditioned on the exclusion of culture in the configuration of universalism cannot achieve the cosmopolitan aspirations of equality. Human beings are enmeshed in culture though the notion of culture is usually under contestation. Individuals are usually unconscious of the entrenched role of culture in their routines of everyday life such that even the most radically liberal individuals and societies cannot successfully decouple their lives from the influence of culture. The chapter borrows from Waldron’s position that generally all cultures have a cosmopolitan dimension since living everyday life involves endeavours of learning from other cultures and unlearning received attitudes and practices and values. Everyday life for every culture also involves seeking convincing justificatory reasons for practices and attitudes one has by virtue of being a member of one group. Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Exclusion • Culture • Universalism • Equality • Contestation • Liberal • Learning • Unlearning • Reasons
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Introduction By its very nature, culture is complex; hence, it is under incessant contestation. Employing Jeremy Waldron’s (2000, 2003) conception of cosmopolitanism, this chapter contends that forms of cosmopolitanism that are preconditioned on the exclusion of culture in the configuration of universalism cannot achieve the cosmopolitan aspirations of equality. Because human beings are enmeshed in culture although always under contestation, such that although usually done unconsciously, even the most radically liberal individuals and collectives cannot decouple themselves successfully from culture. The chapter borrows from Waldron’s position that all cultures generally have a cosmopolitan dimension since living everyday life involves endeavours of learning from other cultures and unlearning received attitudes and practices and values. Everyday life for every culture also involves seeking convincing justificatory reasons for practices and attitudes one has by virtue of being a member of one group. The chapter, therefore, ultimately submits that the ideal of cosmopolitanism is inherent in the notion of culture since no culture is self-sufficient and it is a fundamental attribute of cultures that they have always been learning from another culture. Since individuals and their institutions are in principle cultured (although not in essentialist terms), cosmopolitan education must value openness to eliminate restrictions posed by structural subordination of one culture to another, which ultimately renders education exclusive rather than inclusive.
Rethinking Culture The central challenge facing cosmopolitanism is and has been how to manage cultural difference. Prevalent forms of cosmopolitan universalism that generally skirt away from difference, concentrate only on emphasising common attributes of humanity undifferentiated by cultural affinities. The implication for this on education today, among others, has been that education is largely informed by a positivistic outlook of reality (Code, 2012; Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Modern education regards only those phenomena that suit positivistic epistemological frameworks in an endeavour to stay clear of engaging the “destabilising” nature of cultural differences. In other words, cosmopolitanism is apparently incompatible with cultural differences. Given this context, assigning a normative value to people’s culture has been considered an obstacle to moral universalism, which is
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the foundation of cosmopolitanism. Such an approach to culture is grounded in a Kantian universalism that normatively recognises only the objective attributes of humanity rooted in reason as having normative worth, to the exclusion of the subjective cultural phenomena (Benhabib, 1992). However, as Jeremy Waldron (2000, p. 231) holds, it is erroneous to suggest that immersion in one particular culture is incompatible with cosmopolitan attitudes. While the previous chapters have shown that a universalism for concrete people ought to take into consideration the subjectivities of people, Jeremy Waldron (2000, 2003) invites us to consider a new approach to cultural diversity. Without necessarily delving into definitions of culture—thus conceding the complexity of the substance of culture—this chapter recognises that there are nevertheless some shared elements of communal life that people share in a non-essentialist manner albeit in different degrees of personal valuation (Miller, 1995, p. 27). Among such major shared attributes are a common language, geographical location and a shared history (Miller, 1995, p. 27). Waldron (2000) criticises the approach of looking at cultures as monolithic institutions that are absolute and insulated from the influence of other cultures. For Waldron (2000, p. 231), one general characteristic of any given culture—except for those whose members have minimal contact with other cultures—is that “cultures in the world have already something of a cosmopolitan aspect.” The implication is that cultural evolution and dynamism are inherent in the notion of culture itself. One further finds that defenders and critics alike of culture in normative discourses tend to consider culture as being static, inherently antagonistic to any transformation, modification and self-criticism. Indeed, this is why both perspectives make the common assumption that culture and its elements can be stripped off the people or decoupled from their meaningful living of everyday lives. Regarding the indispensability of culture from both individual and collective life even in radically liberal individuals and communities, one should not to claim that culture is essentially constitutive of individual and collective identities. Rather, it is only a recognition that the elements and bonds of culture are so strong on the community that the mother tongue is the language of instruction in school and all official purposes. The political culture that enables democratic life is built on some unique social values, a national history informing the aspirations and regulating the aspirations of community life that, as Nieto (2008) holds, such aspects of culture are often unrecognised and taken for granted, ultimately mistaken as being non-existent. The point here is that
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human beings and their communities cannot be stripped of their cultural being. The exercise of dismissing the cultural being of individuals as being inimical to cosmopolitanism is therefore problematic.
Globalisation Is Not New In the context of globalisation, which is the major driver for the cultivation of cosmopolitan norms, it is worth recognising that globalisation—as a process of cultural encounters and aspiration for dignified engagement with the other—is not new. According to Waldron (2003), globalisation— as the encounter of distinct if not contrastive cultures—has always been there. Migrations and cultural encounters arising from trade, for instance, have always led to the necessity of the cultivation of a cosmopolitan spirit. For Waldron (2003), because cultures are a form of life for a people, cultures therefore have active capacities for adoption of new perspectives, questioning and revising current practices, and also embracing newer, better and efficient ways of being. The inevitable interdependence nature of modern global life necessitates encounters with other cultures, and such an encounter compels culture changes. For Waldron (2000), particular cultures have within them non-local but yet localised attributes, which some members may cherish more than any other attribute of the culture, for example religion. An individual may regard religious beliefs that are not indigenous to him or her, to be more valuable or even constitutive of his or her identity than any other local goods of his or her indigeneity. The reality of cultures is that they are forms of life for members. Members therefore do not put effort into participating in the culture because all they do generally, is endorse—or in a manner of contestation— embrace the mores of the society, as constitutive of their ways of life or their shared lives (Waldron, 2000, p. 234). Understanding culture this way informs one that it is almost impossible to isolate an individual from the culture(s) under which he or she has developed, neither can every aspect of culture be dismissed as restrictive of individual liberty. This position should however not be conflated with an unconditional endorsement and insulation of culture from external criticism. Rather, it is a position that recognises the fact that absolute moral principles are translated into real-life situations by flesh-and-blood human beings in modes and frames that are partly shaped by the cultural situatedness of the people and therefore consciously and unconsciously constitutive of the members of the community.
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Social norms are not like things one opts for now or later, from which one can detach oneself or strip oneself (Waldron, 2000). To the members of a particular group, group norms are “embedded in a structure of reasons and reasoning” of the group (Waldron, 2000, p. 235), and such reasoning—although under incessant contestation—is not designed single-handedly but rather shared. As Pettit (2014) holds, the possibility of collective life is made possible because among the interlocutors— [E]ach understand[s]—typically as a matter of shared awareness—that in order to organize our relations with the other in a congenial pattern, we have to be sure to use words in representation of ourselves that will attract a desired interpretation and response. (Pettit, 2014, p. 1656)
Each of the members of the community “operate[s] under conversational conventions—say, the conventions establishing what is an assertion or commitment or request—to make ourselves interpretable by the other and of course to interpret the other in turn” (Pettit, 2014, p. 1657). It is this regard that Waldron (2000) holds that the norms of a particular cultural group make deep, powerful claims about what is important and which sort of things are at stake in the areas of life that they govern. Those claims are usually held to be true (by those who make them), which means that they claim to offer to give a better account of what really matters than the reasoning associated with the different norms and practices of the society next door or across the sea. Now, that reasoning may bewilder and disconcert us; it is no part of my argument … But [this reasoning] is like ours at least in this: that it represents or claims to represent some repository of human wisdom as to the best way of doing things. As such it necessarily makes its reasoning available … to understanding and assessment on the basis of what else there is in the world in the way of human wisdom and experience on questions such as those that the norm purports to address. And that, I think is what cosmopolitan—or what has the potential to be universal and cosmopolitan—about the character of genuine as opposed to fake or patronizing participation in the life and practice of one’s particular community. (Waldron, 2000, pp. 235–236)
Thus far, it is apparent that human beings are cultural beings. Furthermore, what constitutes culture has multiple sources of origin with so much obtained externally, outside the cultural group. Such other modes of culture are the result of the capacity of the receiving cultural group for
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revision and reformation. This reinforces Waldron’s (2000) position that cultures have a cosmopolitan capacity. Put differently, there exists no pure culture but cultures are incessantly dynamic, constantly being influenced and re-shaped by external other cultures. The foregoing therefore shows that no culture is self-sufficient and self- sustaining in meeting the challenges of the human condition. Cultural encounters through whatever motivation always initiate a form of reformation and revision where aspects of the other culture once unknown and at times prejudiced against come to be integrated into another culture. However, as Waldron (2003, p. 29) holds, cultural encounters are rarely smooth and just. There are lingering forms of philosophical, normative, epistemological and cultural injustices across the world today. By implication, we cannot ignore that encounters are still enduring structures of inequality and exclusion in education.
Subordinate and Subaltern Cultural Encounters Waldron (2003, p. 29) holds that the demographic make-up of human societies is such that there is mingling of cultures driven by numerous historical events some of which were hideous, such as imperial conquest, genocide and ethnic cleansing. For Waldron (2003, p. 29) mostly, historically encounters between cultures have largely been violent ultimately resulting in lingering injustices prevailing today. Such injustices manifest in the one-time dominating culture still dominating other cultures today. With respect to globalisation, there is a generally Eurocentric culture that informs globalisation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015, p. 488). The reality of the encounter between Eurocentrism and most other global cultures was achieved through colonialism, slave trade, regular trade and missionary proselytisation. Whereas there was the benefit of most host cultures of conventional education there was at the same time subjugation of the local cultures as they were deemed inferior and in need of reforming to the standards of Eurocentrism (Banda, 1982). Beyond the end of the colonisation experience, coloniality is still retained in the Eurocentric ethical, epistemological and metaphysical ideologies that characterise frameworks of modern education, which aspires for cosmopolitanism (Maldonado- Torres, 2007, p. 243). The subordinate relationship retained by host cultures in relation to the dominant one that underlies education, still harbours within it the subordination and othering of contrary cultural frameworks. Ultimately, as Waldron (2003, p. 29) observes, those
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s ubordinate cultures get compromised. This is aggravated when the dominating culture becomes the embedded driving force of the global order and global education. Given the inherent capacity for cultures to aspire for better modes of life in the community (which opens some room for inner criticism) and also given that education is informed by particularistic cultural perspectives, modern education results in the perpetuation of the subordination of other cultures on the mere basis of their otherness. It is therefore imperative that education need not be only cosmopolitan, but also that cosmopolitanism must seriously centre on the differences of people of the world. For Waldron (2000), cosmopolitanism is not a mere “philanthropic principle of ethics, but a principle of right.” Rather, it imposes a certain juridically based discipline in politics, a discipline rooted in our diversity, our potential disagreements, and our need nevertheless for law because we hold disparate views about justice and follow different traditions but still live unavoidably side by side with one another and have to come to terms with one another (Waldron, 2000, p. 241). However, such encounters—if left to be reduced to having a common law—will result in an attitude of “live and let live” with the other still retaining those prejudices, injustices and marginalisations. The domain of law as a discipline may not entirely capture what human subjectivities encounter in non-formal domains which, however, are the majority of domains where injustice thrives as they are deemed to be the domains of the private sphere. It is on this basis that the motivation and nature of the deliberation upon the encounter must be governed by the desire to understand what motivates the other.
Openness and Difference as Cosmopolitan Education According to Waldron (2000, p. 242), cosmopolitan right is “one’s willingness to do what is required by the general principle of sharing this limited world with others.” Waldron argues that ideal cosmopolitan is made possible by the key virtues of tolerance, openness to debate and interaction, respect for the elementary traditions and procedures that make group life possible, and a willingness to restrain and mitigate sectarian enmities (so that the brightest of lines is drawn between civil society and civil war): all these are important, if civil society is to flourish, and all must be an accounted part of the informal morality of citizenship (Waldron, 2003, pp. 43–44). The openness Waldron (2003) suggests to achieve
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c osmopolitanism, would fall into two categories and should be enacted by two distinct agents. As already highlighted, there is no self-sufficient culture nor any culture insulated from the influences of another. The claim that modern education is generally exclusive of ‘subaltern’ cultures is neither a call for returning of non-mainstream cultures to an alleged prestigious puritan past, nor is it a dismissal of anything high-level or Eurocentric. Firstly, for openness to achieve a cosmopolitanism of difference, there is a need for modern education to concede that the metaphysical, epistemological and normative frameworks underlying modern education are exclusive of alternative or complementary frames that on account of their particularistic historical grounding are labelled as subaltern. It is imperative that modern education with its emphasis on commonalities of human nature as the bedrock for cosmopolitanism marginalises other experiences that are incompatible with the Eurocentric frameworks of modern education. Openness entails that in education, curriculum design and content selection are not conceived in exclusive terms. Pedagogical experiences employed in the school must also be responsive to the cultural subjectivity of a people. In the African context, education has generally been criticised for being detached from African experiences (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015; Ramose, 2016; Zeleza, 2009). In a sense, modern education in Africa still retains the pseudo-relevance of hierarchies of colonialism (Mignolo, 2007). The absence and underdevelopment of African languages in education is one form of such detachment of local experiences in the quest of pursuing a cosmopolitan education, as acquiring cosmopolitan skills today is synonymous with acquisition of the English language, which is the flipside of active de-investing in local languages both by African governments as well as by individuals (Kamwendo, 2010). In the Malawian context, the summary and existentialist conception of localised as being obstructive of cosmopolitan ideals has resulted in the removal of the teaching and learning of Malawian history as part of education for democratic citizenship (Hauya, 1997; Ministry of Education, 2005; UNESCO, 1994). Local human story has been replaced by Social and Development Science, whose basic nature is exploration of ideals, systems and supportive structures of democracy (Ministry of Education, 2005). Upon critical examination, one can trace the influence of a cosmopolitanism grounded in a form of universalism that necessarily excludes local being. Such approaches ignore the reality that there are peculiar injustices that are unique to a particular community and which are directly
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tied to the history of the nation. As Waldron (2000) emphasises, we cannot decouple culture (contestable as the concept is) from a people’s public life because as Kymlicka (2002) contends, even the people’s liberal democratic public institutions and the norms for appropriately participating in them are informed by the culture of the community. As a result, meaningful participation in institutions requires cultural competence of the values of the community. This being the case, a critical engagement of a people’s history is indispensable in order to have guarantees that local injustices that sustain exclusion are contextually interrogated to ensure inclusion of all people. Furthermore, such local injustices would sometimes have a trans-local origin. Unless the enduring structures that enabled the exclusion in the past are examined and reconstituted, local and global injustices may therefore still prevail. This position entails that the meaningfulness and justness of a particular democratic society do not reside in some universal structures of ideal democracy but rather in the way such structures correct the imbalances of the community as well as shape its present and future in the context of the history of the community. Secondly, Waldron (2000) suggests that the notion of openness as a virtue is necessary to achieve a cosmopolitanism of difference. Such a cosmopolitanism places an obligation on the subjugated cultural communities to affirm their peculiarities, not as objects that merely need to be corrected, but also as alternative modes of being. This means that the “subaltern” just bring out their voice and articulate their aspirations to constitute the education enterprise. Such endeavours challenge the prevalent status quo in cosmopolitan education. For instance, the neo-liberal ideology that drives globalism is informed by a particular exclusively individualistically centred conception of human nature that has ultimately promoted one of multi-faceted forms of education (Ramose, 2010). Education has generally assumed an adversarial competition that does not esteem co-operation or concern for the other (Beets & Le Grange, 2005; Ramose, 2010). Ultimately, education now focuses on cultivating capitalist market-demanded skills (Giroux, 2005; Pais & Costa, 2017), which is finally resulting in commodification of education. This gives rise to many failing to access education, especially higher education. If cosmopolitan education is to be open to normatively valid forms of being, it obliges in principle those communities that have been marginalised to challenge neo-liberal ideology in modern education, without which inclusion of local perspectives will not be possible.
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Difference and Deliberation For Waldron (2000), the nature of human interaction and interdependence today renders prediction of the traits of the culture of others one will encounter in everyday life sooner or later difficult. Such different people have differing or contrasting philosophical outlooks about the form and substance of justice as it is necessary that there should be a “common body of positive law” (Waldron, 2000, p. 241). Encountering an other is a result of past experiences of history as well as due to the inevitable demands of modern interconnected global life (Waldron, 2000). As such “common moral views and shared understandings” cannot be taken for granted (Waldron, 2000, p. 241). There must therefore be an inevitable deliberation to have a shared basis for engagement and co-operation. The cosmopolitanism of Waldron presupposes a form of deliberation as being central to the realisation of cosmopolitan education, which is inclusive. Deliberation in education will unearth those forms of inequality and exclusion that are seemingly rationalised in modern education. Unless the cosmopolitanism that shapes education pursued is sensitive to difference, the education risks hiding and retaining the systematic exclusion that is embedded in globalism and the cosmopolitan ambitions of globalism that apparently aspire for equal concern. A cosmopolitanism that necessarily de-emphasises cultural difference will only serve to perpetuate subjugation of one form of culture by another.
Summary Using Waldron’s (2000) conception of cosmopolitanism, this chapter argued that culture—although it is a contestable ideal—is among the indispensable substances that constitute being human for actual human beings irrespective of individuals’ valuation of elements of culture. The chapter has submitted that, within cultures, there are inherent notions of cosmopolitanism, which Waldron (2000) argues are enacted when cultures engage another culture, and when cultures seek ways of bettering themselves in the context of their lack of self-sufficiency. This shows that cosmopolitanism cannot sideline culture. The implication for education is that cosmopolitan education must engage the cultures of human societies by embracing the virtue of openness rather than regard them as impediments to achieving equality. This is because encounters of cultures—even through education—are themselves mostly structured on unjust legacies of subordination that render the alleged cosmopolitan education exclusive.
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References Banda, K. N. (1982). A brief history of education in Malawi. Blantyre: Dzuka. Beets, P., & Le Grange, L. (2005). ‘Africanising’ assessment practices: Does the notion of Ubuntu hold any promise? South African Journal of Higher Education, 19, Special Issue, 1197–1207. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Code, L. (2012). Taking subjectivity into account. In C. W. Ruitenberg & D. C. Phillips (Eds.), Education, culture and epistemological diversity: Mapping a disputed terrain (pp. 85–100). Dordrecht: Springer. Giroux, H. A. (2005). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Hauya, R. J. (1997). Education in Malawi: The question of curriculum. Blantyre: Dzuka. Kamwendo, G. H. (2010). Denigrating the local, glorifying the foreign: Malawian language policies in the era of African renaissance. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies—Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 5(2), 270–282. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Politics in the vernacular: Nationalism, multiculturalism and citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2/3), 240–270. Mignolo, W. E. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2/3), 155–167. Miller, D. (1995). On nationality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ministry of Education. (2005). Malawi primary school syllabuses, Standard 7: Chichewa, English, Mathematics, Expressive Arts, Life Skills, Social and Environmental Sciences, Science and Technology, Agriculture, Bible Knowledge, Religious Education. Domasi: Malawi Institute of Education. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2015). Decoloniality as the future of Africa. History Compass, 13(10), 485–496. Nieto, S. (2008). Culture and education. In D. Coulter & J. R. Wiens (Eds.), Why do we educate? Renewing the conversation (pp. 127–142). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pais, A., & Costa, M. (2017). An ideology critique of global citizenship education. Critical Studies in Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487. 2017.1318772. Pettit, P. (2014). Group agents are not expressive, pragmatic or theoretical fictions. Erkenntnis, 79(Suppl 9), 1641–1662. Ramose, M. B. (2010). The death of democracy and the resurrection of timocracy. Journal of Moral Education, 39(3), 291–303.
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Ramose, M. B. (2016). Teacher and student with a critical pan-epistemic orientation: An ethical necessity for Africanising the educational curriculum in Africa. South African Journal of Philosophy, 35(4), 546–555. UNESCO. (1994). Primary curriculum improvement and teacher education: Project findings and recommendations. Retrieved June 19, 2019, from http:// unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0009/000984/098485eo.pdf. Waldron, J. (2000). What is cosmopolitanism? The Journal of Political Philosophy, 8(2), 227–243. Waldron, J. (2003). Teaching cosmopolitan right. In K. McDonough & W. Freinberg (Eds.), Citizenship and education in liberal-democratic societies (pp. 23–55). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zeleza, P. T. (2009). African studies and universities since independence. Transition, 4(101), 110–135.
CHAPTER 6
Universalism and Judgements in Educational Encounters
Abstract In this chapter, using Sharon Todd’s notions of judgement and “cosmopolitics,” which is a contestation of cosmopolitan universalism, we contend that learners are not a homogeneous group with generally common fundamental interests. What constitutes their moral needs as moral persons seeking just encounters and relations can be met by a cosmopolitanism that emphasises and embeds common values only in the objective roles and rules that govern educational encounters. The chapter argues that learners are concrete beings with constitutively different moral needs and interests, which cannot all be couched up in impartialist terms in order to expect that adherence to impartial rules and roles will guarantee satisfaction of cosmopolitan ideals. Given this background, it is imperative that judgement-making in the university by teachers and others should not be restricted to Todd’s idea of scripted cosmopolitanism, but rather intersubjectivity must contextualise rules and roles to avoid the risk of ignoring and undermining legitimate moral interests that reside in a learner’s otherness as a concrete being. Keywords Judgement • Cosmopolitics • Cosmopolitan universalism • Moral needs • Moral persons • Encounters • Common values • Educational encounters • University • Teachers • Scripted cosmopolitanism • Risk • Moral interests • Learner • Otherness
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Introduction By their nature, educational encounters in a university involve countless instances of judgement-making with and about others. Such judgements are made either implicitly or explicitly. Judgements in principle have moral and justice dimensions in that they either affect the moral interests of the people involved or they contain presuppositions about the normativity of some aspects of people’s lives. Performance of the duties of a teacher is governed by laid-down rules and roles. When confronted with moral dilemmas, the teacher is required to make recourse to the rules and roles that are apparently informed by impersonal moral values. Such rules express in principle the desire of educational institutions to overcome diversity and achieve some common values. However, the diversity of human societies today, owing to global interconnection and mobility, brings rules and role-dependent cosmopolitan education into question. Using Sharon Todd’s (2007) notions of judgement and “agonistic cosmopolitics,” which is a contestation of cosmopolitan universalism (Todd, 2010, p. 216), this chapter contends that learners are not a homogeneous group with generally common fundamental interests so that what constitutes their moral needs as moral persons seeking just encounters and relations can be met by a cosmopolitanism that emphasises and embeds common values only in the objective roles and rules that govern educational encounters. The chapter contends that learners are concrete beings with constitutively different moral needs and interests, which cannot all be conjured up in impartialist terms in order to expect that adherence to impartial rules and roles will guarantee satisfaction of cosmopolitan ideals. Given this background, it is imperative that judgement-making in a university by teachers and others should not be restricted to Todd’s (2007, p. 29) idea of scripted cosmopolitanism, but rather, intersubjectivity must contextualise rules and roles to avoid the risk of ignoring and undermining legitimate moral interests that reside in a learner’s otherness as a concrete being. Lastly, the chapter argues that the inability of universalism to single-handedly account for moral respect in educational encounters ought not to lead to an outlawing of universalism. Moral universalism has its particular place in just educational encounters as well as in cosmopolitanism.
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Cosmopolitanism: Universalism Versus Diversity A cosmopolitan ethic calls for an appreciation of the values and traditions of the diverse people of the world. Cosmopolitanism also values “a commitment to broad, universal principles that can secure the flourishing of that diversity” (Todd, 2007, p. 26). However, given this context, a cosmopolitan ethic faces the challenge of navigating between respecting human rights and respecting cultural diversity. For Todd (2007, p. 26), privileging rights in principle, by implication “denies the very cornerstone of human plurality upon which cosmopolitanism is usually grounded.” Today, educational encounters characteristically occur in a context of diversity. The content of the curriculum is in most cases informed by a dominant global culture that owes its heritage to a particularistic culture (Giroux, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2014). Educational practice too is informed by the mainstream culture of the community. With respect to educational encounters in the classroom context, the reality is that “an increasingly divergent public—and classroom—discourse about values, rights and equality” poses a complex challenge for the teacher of “judging what is just” (Todd, 2007, p. 27). The coming together of people with diverse cultural backgrounds through global interconnectedness necessitates the cultivation of cosmopolitan “intercultural forms of exchange” (Todd, 2010, pp. 215–216). The dominating trend in cosmopolitan education has been in developing universal political, legal and moral conditions that can enable more democratic and more harmonious global co-existence (Todd, 2010, pp. 215–216). However, for Todd (2010), both the approach and the substance of a cosmopolitanism that emphasises “the universal aspects of that exchange and is exclusively grounded in abstract notions of the ideas of a universal humanity, universal rights, and universally agreed upon standards of communication” are problematic. Furthermore, for Todd (2010), the dominant model of cosmopolitan education that seeks “more peaceful forms of living together on a global scale is in need of a theoretical framework that faces directly the difficulties of living in a dissonant world” (Todd, 2010, p. 216).
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Cosmopolitan Judgements Are Concrete Whereas encounters in the other domains of public life are relatively less complex to negotiate for those whose philosophical outlooks are different from those of the mainstream, the university setup poses more complex challenges for encounters that are mutually respectful. The norms and terms of interaction in the university are both public and private. Being a public institution, the implication is that there are presuppositions about human nature, and the nature of moral interactions that inform the relationships, processes and rules of teaching and learning. For instance, the role of the teacher is officially coded and the teacher is expected to conform to it as part of his or her work. The nature and content of the curriculum in the university is not at the discretion of the teacher but, in a loose sense, it is authenticated by the state. The interests of the state are always largely in relation to the aspirations of the community and are therefore steeped in the local culture, on the one hand. On the other hand, there are private relationships, which the learner as a human being develops in the university with learners and teachers who might be distinct from the formal ones. What is noteworthy about such relationships is that the dynamics of mainstream and minority cultures also come into play. This is because the university is in principle a microcosm of society in terms of social demographic representation. Furthermore, it is worth recognising that even the execution of public or official roles by the teacher in the university cannot be divorced from the background cultural outlooks of the teacher as a person. Put differently, the university is today a setup where the educational encounters bring to the surface questions of difference, either of the learner, the teacher or officially coded laws. The university is thus a place where learners should not be conceptualised as homogeneous moral beings with common interests and needs that are met through generic responses. Ultimately, the university is a place of encounters that are marked by incessant judgements made by the state, teachers and learners among themselves as concrete (as opposed to abstract) beings. A cosmopolitan ethic is meant to ensure that learners in a university cultivate skills of harmonious existence with different others as global citizens. Such an ethic is also meant to ensure that interactions and encounters themselves are consistent with respecting the individual as the ultimate unit of moral concern in a university. As Todd (2007) holds, one domain in which a cosmopolitan ethic ought to ensure and achieve respect for human equality, is to
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consider the countless judgements that teachers in a university make. Encounters are domains of judgements, among others, about what to teach and how to teach it, whom to involve and when in the teaching and learning experiences, which sort of responses are appropriate or not, which learner behaviour warrants sanctions, and which sort of sanctioning should or should not involve parents of a learner in the case of the school. Teachers are constantly confronted with situations where they are expected to make decisions, evaluate, compare and prioritise the increasingly competing individual demands and needs of learners (Todd, 2007, p. 28). They are expected to make such decisions quickly and efficiently, which compels them to rely on “well-worn strategies and rules of engagement” (Todd, 2007, p. 28). Thus, teachers are always making judgements, and this has implications on justice. For Todd (2007, p. 28), deciding who speaks, when and to whom, judging the truth value of an account given by a learner, determining how to respond to a disruption, which behaviour warrants notifying and calling parents, determining which behaviour is racist or sexist—all involve the teacher to make due judgements that have implications on justice (Todd, 2007, p. 28). For Todd (2007), justice is a necessary condition of judgements, which ultimately renders “the practice of judging in teaching a practice of justice as well” because “judgements are statements of our prioritised responsibilities and of the results of our weighing the elements of a situation in order to reach a verdict. They say something about us to the world, and thus signal our own implication in it” (Todd, 2007, p. 28). It is, however, worth recognising that although the teacher and learners may be availed with cosmopolitan knowledge tool kits locked in the coded generally impersonal rules, roles and norms of interaction, “judgement is not about invisibles, but is concerned with actual persons and circumstances” (Todd, 2007, p. 31). Furthermore, the nature of a judgement is that it is not a purely subjective endeavour; “the solo performance of the thinking ego” that centres and values only one’s own thinking but rather it also takes into account “fellow judges” (Todd, 2007, pp. 31–32). This intersubjectivity that characterises judgement keeps judgement alive, ultimately rendering judgement a cosmopolitan activity since cosmopolitanism entails “an engagement in a world rich with diversity” (Todd, 2007, pp. 31–32). As Todd (2007, p. 32) holds, the nature of judgement is that it inherently requires consideration of the other because—
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The I or ego is susceptible to others in the outside world, to what lies exterior to it. It cannot think without the disruption that only an exterior relation can provide. So although the consequence of thinking may indeed be the conversation one has with oneself, that conversation is provoked into existence by otherness and is not self-constituting.
Thinking Cosmopolitan and Not Educating for Cosmopolitanism Given the intersubjective nature of judgements made by teachers and educationists consciously and unconsciously, it is pertinent to avoid complacency towards rules of standards, only taking them at face value, but rather, our judgements should not merely appealing to some categories and formulas—a matter of being instrumental (Todd, 2007, p. 30). Application of rules and performance of roles should be guided by thoughtfulness and thoughtfulness ought to consider situatedness actively. Looked at in this way, a lack of thoughtfulness of the agent does not only lead to bad judgements; rather, in principle, no judgement is made at all; yet, the agent is expected to make a judgement (Todd, 2007, p. 30). Given the complexity of the roles of a teacher, pragmatism has necessitated that a teacher be given a schedule of rules of engagement with learners so as not to digress from the core aspirations of an educational institution. With respect to cultivating cosmopolitan citizenship skills in learners, the tendency has largely been one of embedding cosmopolitan values and principles in rules of engagement. This way, the ultimate expectation is that once the interactions between and among teachers and learners are inspired by such rules steeped in cosmopolitan norms, cosmopolitan aspirations will have been fulfilled. However, the necessity for caution towards such an approach of conformity to cosmopolitan rules in the school in order to satisfy cosmopolitan justice has two sources of problems. Firstly, there is the question of a particularistic form of cosmopolitan universalism (2012) informing the given rules. As previous chapters have shown, such a particularistic conception of universalism may exclude other alternative forms of universalism on the basis of its acclaimed transcendence. Looked at this way, conforming to “cosmopolitan” rules in the school will serve to exclude the otherness of some learners. Secondly, according to Todd (2007, p. 29), such an approach to cosmopolitanism is problematic in that conformity to scripted rules of
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e ngagement that stipulate the roles of the teacher, makes the judgements of the teacher less thoughtful as judgements that ensue from such rules hardly consider intersubjectivity and situationality but postulate much about being humans in largely abstract terms. However, being human is a concrete experience, which can by far not be fully and adequately accounted for by transcendent selves. The need to consider intersubjectivity in educators’ making of judgements in the university is therefore urgent. The urgency is due to the context of global diversity and interconnectedness that necessitate the pursuit of cosmopolitan education to ensure moral respect.
Beyond Scripted Cosmopolitanism in Educational Encounters For Todd (2007, p. 29), although rules and regulations would guide a teacher in making judgements under such contexts, the rules are at times, if not mostly, incapable of guiding the teacher so that they have to be abandoned at times as they may yield unjust outcomes if followed (Todd, 2007, p. 29). We should not put too much faith and trust in rules as the safeguards to our actions. Instead, what we need to reflect on is how judgement demands thinking beyond the standard scripts. That is, we should think about our roles as opposed to letting those roles determine our thinking. This is particularly acute when it comes to a seemingly benevolent script such as cosmopolitanism, “for it simply cannot provide the answers it sometimes professes to be able to offer” (Todd, 2007, p. 29). This poses serious problems for a scripted cosmopolitanism that demands adherence to certain ideals. Cosmopolitanism is not and should not be reduced to a script. This is because by doing so, a cosmopolitan ethic will hide systematic and subtle injustices suffered by concrete human beings. The nature of the work of teachers is such that it scarcely leaves them with adequate time for thinking about their judgements. For Todd (2007, pp. 35–36), this necessitates that “we need to reflect on how we can propose a thoughtful orientation to our judgements; that is, to think about our roles, as opposed to letting those roles determine our thinking” (Todd, 2007, pp. 35–36). The nature of such thoughtfulness “refuses both the simplicity of self-righteous moralising and the anonymity provided by standards and rules. It is a thoughtfulness that carries within it a
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cosmopolitan sense: a thought that is born from others who are my neighbours” (Todd, 2007, pp. 35–36). In response to how teachers make judgements regarding matters of values, rights and equality without, for instance, only appealing to abstract rules that inherently exclude the concreteness of being human, Todd (2007, pp. 35–36) recommends that “thinking cosmopolitan” as opposed to “thinking according to cosmopolitanism” allows us some room for acknowledging the ideal of justice that prevails in making judgements and puts human diversity at the centre of what too often appears to be a solitary enterprise (Todd, 2007, pp. 35–36).
Education for Thinking Cosmopolitanism Todd (2007, p. 27) emphasises that there is a difference between what she calls “educating for cosmopolitanism, which entails a faith in principles, and ‘thinking cosmopolitan’, which entails an aspiration for justice for my neighbours.” If the cosmopolitan project is left to ensuring conformity with absolutist and overarching first principles only, it will ignore and undermine what makes human existence to be concrete, meaningful and fulfilling to individuals. The substance that makes human existence concrete and meaningful is diverse across the people of the world and is reducible to some common abstract principles. Calling for education for cosmopolitanism not to be scripted has implications for the designing of the curriculum, nature and quality of pedagogy, as well as for the imagination and execution of a teacher’s roles. As previous chapters have shown, the predominant form of cosmopolitanism in and across the world—and especially in developing nations today—is grounded in a universalism that accords paramountcy to abstract transcendent selves as the epitome of recognising and respecting human equality. This form of cosmopolitanism is aimed at achieving global co-existence by taming and muting sources of global diversity (Arneson, 2016; Habermas, 2003; Nili, 2015; Nussbaum, 2002) even in all educational encounters. The ultimate implication in education has been that education has largely pursued positivistic knowledge (Code, 2012) and marginalised cultural experiences that are incompatible with a particularistic universalism that inheres the cosmopolitan epistemology in a university (Gay, 2000, p. 113). Education for cosmopolitanism seems to face two major challenges. As the previous chapters have shown, the essentialising nature of an absolutist cosmopolitanism that necessarily excludes local particularism is
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roblematic. Firstly, it undermines the substance of what makes human p beings actual other than generalised abstract human beings. Secondly, the modes of cultivating cosmopolitan universalism are also skewed against local particularism. This is manifested by the dominance of scripted cosmopolitanism in the educational domain. As Todd (2007) has indicated, the rigid roles the teacher must perform, as well as determination of the nature and substance of the curriculum constitute pitfalls that ultimately reduce hope for the cultivation and achievement of cosmopolitan virtues. An essentialist and impartial cosmopolitan universalism will demand the relationship of a teacher and learner to be governed by largely positivistic norms that regard all the learners as equal only on the basis of their being rational, knowledge-seeking human beings whose being human originates from the objective capacities they have in common with all humanity. The implication is that sources of differences should not be part of the norms for engaging with a teacher, rather, they should pertain to the private domain. With respect to the curriculum, the universalism of an impartialist cosmopolitanism has resulted in prescriptions of curriculum content that is required to conform to the absolutism of human impartiality, and whose major characteristic is an emphasis on human commonalities, whilst simultaneously excluding particularism and its subjectivities in knowledge construction and pedagogical experiences. The result has largely been that indigenous epistemologies, for instance, have been systematically marginalised as lacking a “unifying” force that will integrate local communities into the global world. Particularistic epistemologies and local interests are marginalised and stripped of normativity, ultimately excluding them from the curriculum on the ostensible grounds that they promote parochialism and narrow-mindedness (Arneson, 2016; Brighouse, 2003; Habermas, 2001) other than the expansiveness that must be promoted to realise global citizenship. Developing countries constantly feel the pressures of catching up to integrate their economies, educational systems, and so on, into the modern global order. Among others, the ultimate implication is that achieving cosmopolitan citizenship is at the cost of stripping particularism of normativity (as essentialist cosmopolitanism demands), inter alia leading to the removal of local languages in early primary education as languages of instruction in public schools, as in the case of Malawian educational policy (Malawi Government, 2013, p. 42; Masina, 2014). Besides, whereas teaching and learning of critical history have rich potential to develop, improve and sustain inclusive democracy, there is no teaching of
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Malawian history at either Malawian primary or secondary school levels (Chirwa & Naidoo, 2014, p. 343). All such education policy positions are informed by the line of thought that regards cosmopolitanism as an ideal that can be served better by embedding cosmopolitan norms in the curriculum content. The assumption in this case is that there is some form and content of knowledge that is inherently inimical to cosmopolitan ambitions and that removing such knowledge from the curriculum is a milestone in achieving and cultivating cosmopolitan virtues. It is, therefore, apparent that there are fundamental problems with a scripted cosmopolitanism in that it outlaws legitimate sources of subjectivities that make being human and being human communities meaningful. Such a cosmopolitanism brands difference as being antagonistic to human equality. It is now evident that inasmuch as there are knowledge and values that are universal and transcend cultural or national barriers, it is inconsistent with the normativity of the actuality of being human to assume that cosmopolitanism consists in the removal or exclusion of particularist local knowledges and values from the curriculum, to promote only that which appeals to human commonality. The implication here is that an ideal cosmopolitanism must not predetermine and prescribe the value of individual and community subjectivities in order to promote harmony. With respect to the university, one has to be mindful of the reality that learners do not comprise a homogeneous group such that all that warrants moral attention and respect are the commonalities they share as human beings only. The moment we concede that difference is constitutive of the individuality of a learner and that it is not something from which a learner can disentangle himself or herself and still retain his or her individuality, we immediately discover that being a teacher cannot be reduced to mere performance of some predetermined roles that apparently embed cosmopolitan impartial values. Instead, one discovers that the social and cultural background context of a teacher, the institutionalised norms, practices and routines of a university inhere some elements of cultural or epistemic bias. Consequently, restricting one’s practice to conformity with rules and laws may actually serve to perpetuate practices that are prejudicial and antagonistic to difference on the mere grounds of being different from the mainstream. As Todd (2007) holds, the teacher should be conscious of the fact that, by being restricted to and by the script of teacher roles, he or she may in principle be working against cosmopolitan ideals. The normativity of difference thus requires that apart from valuing what ought to be commonly valued across global societies, cosmopolitan
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education should also value the indispensability of intersubjectivity in educational encounters across the world. This entails an understanding of the other in which learners—especially those in less developed countries who are being passively coerced by the global order to integrate (whose flipside is to strip localness of normativity)—should be “repositioned into a place of normativity” where learners are understood as subjects in their teaching and learning experiences and not as mere objects (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 76). In light of the limitations of essentialist cosmopolitanism in education, it is imperative that we reconsider the cultivation of cosmopolitan virtues as no longer being limited to inclusion of some nature of content of curriculum as well as an observance of certain impartiality-oriented roles and norms expected of a teacher. Instead, we ought to regard cosmopolitan education as being tantamount to developing habits of mind, educating for thinking cosmopolitan rather than educating for cosmopolitanism (Todd, 2007, p. 30). Indeed, as Todd (2007) holds, when education is in principle reduced to pursuing an -ism such as cosmopolitanism, education risks thoughtlessness that leads to evil (Todd, 2007, p. 30). Thinking and judgement-making are relational in nature. As Todd (2007, pp. 34–35) posits, thinking is central in judgement not only because of what thinking can do (criticise, challenge, reflect), but that it does so fundamentally in relation to human plurality. Thinking has a fundamentally cosmopolitan quality. Thought is therefore not simply a flight into solitude, but rather a relationship across radical difference where my thinking is enabled by the provocation of others. This means that, although thinking is a distinct form of conversation, it is nonetheless occasioned by the conscious recognition of exteriority and the freedom of others. Ultimately, rules or standards (morality, quite simply) are not the stuff of judgement; rather, it is the unique thinker who is responsible for the judgements he or she makes (Todd, 2007, pp. 34–35).
No More Place for Universalism? Todd argues for “agonistic cosmopolitics,” which in principle is a re- conceptualisation of cosmopolitan thought that transcends the rigid attachments to universalism and “takes a sober view of pluralism, seeing politics as the project of confronting dissonant voices, affiliations, and practices” (Todd, 2010, p. 216). Todd (2010, p. 216) argues that an agonistic cosmopolitics “puts into question the cherished political aim of harmonising diversity through dialogical models of democracy. Moreover,
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this view of the cosmopolitical interrogates the very status of universalism as a ground for either democracy or projects concerned with global justice.” It is imperative, however, to highlight disagreement with Todd here. The position of this book is that universalism is concretised differently across diverse human communities across the globe. Furthermore, and as a consequence, there should not be a predetermined dismissal of different sources or expressions of subjectivity among the peoples of the world, regarding such subjectivities as inherently devoid of normative value and that they consequently should be suppressed and extinguished in cosmopolitanist configurations. However, such positions should not lead to denying the existence and binding-ness of objective moral values. In other words, factoring subjectivity into cosmopolitanism calls for caution in the conceptualisation of universalism, conceding the necessity and indeed existence of transcendent universalistic norms that are not limited by cultural particularism although their concrete expression varies from one society to the other. This position is unlike that of Todd (2010) who highly esteems the pursuit of cultural exchange to the extent of almost denying the relevance and moral necessity of moral universalism. While Todd’s (2010, p. 217) criticism of theories that pursue “a sense of cosmopolitanism that seeks to harmonise dissonance in the name of global or dialogic democracy itself” is laudable, she, however, takes a radical position against universalism that elevates the space for pluralism to almost the same essentialist and exclusive proportions that cosmopolitan universalism has unduly acquired for itself. There is a potential danger of an anti- universalist stance that propagates the virtue of cultural exchange slipping into a “universalism” in its own right. For Todd (2010, p. 217), “the plural nature of social life cannot thereby be ‘overcome’, nor should it be, for if pluralism is to have any political meaning the conflicts it gives rise to need to occupy an important place in any theory of democracy—cosmopolitan or otherwise.” Unlike Benhabib (2011), who is critical of generalised universalism but supports one grounded in the fundamental right to have rights or communicative freedom, Todd (2010) almost seems to dismiss the worth of universalism in defence of pluralism, which she seems to defend in a sense as a good with inherent worth. However, pluralism cannot be defended for its own sake, and at the same time, the need for global co-existence and harmony cannot be dismissed given the very nature of pluralism. The reality of pluralism in a shared world by itself raises as its flipside the challenge and necessity to have common frameworks towards some social or global
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realities or challenges that require transcending difference for common concerted efforts. Without not always prescribing the substance and content of such universalism, it is inevitable and necessary that there at least be a dialogic deliberation not to extinguish difference but to preserve it without compromising the co-existence, mutual understanding and respect that in part are grounded in some minimally shared universal values that function as the building block enabling tolerance of otherness. The fundamental right to communicative freedom or right to have rights (Benhabib, 2011) is an instance of the normative legitimation of pluralism. Todd (2010, p. 219) seems to be wary of the dangers of universalism as it can be exported and be imposed or enforced on others in the modern pluralist world. However, one wonders why Todd’s (2010) concern for a dismissal of moral universalism is based only on a radical essentialist form of cosmopolitanism, ignoring deliberative forms of universalism that start from and with difference, dismissing such forms as equally carrying the same potential threats to global pluralism and ultimately being as problematic as the radical forms of universalism. In the global context, the danger of an exclusive commitment to pluralism that almost necessarily sidelines universalism in order to serve cultural pluralism ostensibly better is that in the guise of tolerating cultural situatedness—even of those who do not fit into the liberal framework—there ultimately is elimination of structures of accountability in the global order resulting in cultures being insulated from external inquiry, which only serves civil repression and political oppression sustained by claims of sovereignty for example. Forms of oppression will be tolerated and perpetuated insulated from criticism in the name of pluralism, which does not centre on or include deliberative universalism.
Should Cosmopolitan Universalism Give Way to Cultural Exchange? Todd (2010, p. 220) posits, [F]or theorists who seek to hold onto cosmopolitanism in terms of its focus on intercultural exchange, the universal tendencies of human rights and universal humanity become deeply problematic … The central problem, as we shall see, is that cosmopolitan forms of universalism seem to betray the very idea of intercultural exchange in that they remain resistant to modification in the face of diverse cultural traditions, histories and meaning systems.
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Perhaps there should be a cautious role of universalism other than sidelining universalism on account that it does not augur well for cultural pluralism. Without a (dialogic) universalism, how will the plural cultures of the world be questioned and demanded to reform? There is thus a challenge to regard the diverse other non-liberal grounded cultures of the world as homogeneous and as one entity that should either be respected or tolerated by any other outsider. The outsider has no moral capacity to question and probe the inhumanity and oppression being meted out by one culture on its own members or outsiders. A cosmopolitanism that compartmentalises and de-problematises cultures of the world as self- contained entities insulated from external criticism is no longer cosmopolitan, for such a cosmopolitanism is not obliged to recognise and protect common humanitarian values. Sticking to this form of cosmopolitanism only serves to preserve and perpetuate inner injustices and oppression in the name of the expectation for outsiders to keep off as a form of respecting a particular community whose idiosyncrasies the outsider cannot comprehend nor be familiar with.
Pluralism as an End in Itself? Preserving pluralism as an end in itself is problematic. This is because in the cosmopolitan commitment to preserve expressions of pluralism or difference (without external others engaging the difference, or without ensuring the Benhabibian minimal conditions of right to communicative freedom (see Benhabib, 2011)) that necessarily demands not engaging the unfamiliar difference of the other shies away from scrutinising internal injustices besides rendering the oppression and injustices in cultural systems and structures invisible. Furthermore, respecting pluralism for the sake of it as though it has intrinsic value in itself and not being relative to the people, undermines or is an oversimplification of what being human is. Being human in the global world today is about having differences from an other, recognising the difference of the other and coming to terms with how to relate in the context of differences. The differences are not merely procedural or abstract. The coming together of different people in a culturally pluralistic world is meant to explore how to continue with social and political co- operation together based on some common values of humanity that are dialogically agreed upon in languages intelligible to each of the interlocutors; yet, their value or profoundness is not limited by the deliberation.
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The people only seek to find a common language for co-operation because each has these values in their culture except they are differently coded, recognised and expressed. In this case, an encounter with the other is inevitable, so too is dialoguing to understand the other and (dis)agreeing with the other in terms of co-operation for shared life. This is what makes a Benhabibian notion of dialogic universalism (see Benhabib, 2011) plausible, where a set of others exchange justifications for action and common values in the context of the legitimacy and binding-ness of their differences. Privileging pluralism over universalism as competing ideals commits the very same mistake of exclusivism as cosmopolitan universalism. A commitment to cultural exchange needs not be a form of insulating cultures from external examination, which could be in the form of cosmopolitan universalism values. Cosmopolitan values need to have a universal dimension since the cosmopolitan project is a double-edged sword. Suppose people are migrating from a country due to economic and political mismanagement, corruption and civil oppression that result into political persecution, lawlessness, dire poverty and even civil conflict. Any other country where the refugees of this country cross the border has a cosmopolitan or moral duty of hospitality to welcome them and not turn them away. However, if the concern of the migrants’ current welfare is what motivates the cosmopolitan duties, the human fabricated causes of the suffering of the migrants too should motivate execution of such duties. One should be as concerned with saving human beings from the ravages of natural elements, such as hunger, starvation, disease, a lack of shelter and a basic good life, as one should be about the sources responsible for the human-induced affliction. Turning a blind eye to the human-induced factors leading to their suffering in the name of respecting cultures, undermines cosmopolitanism. A minimalist conception of universal cosmopolitan norms is therefore inevitable if cosmopolitanism is to be meaningful. No human would want to migrate to another country involuntarily and in such a perilous undignified manner as frequently happens across the Mediterranean Sea (Uchehara, 2016). In an ideal sense, an individual would want to migrate voluntarily to another country and not be coerced to do so. Furthermore, placed-ness has value to being human, the free mobility advantages of global interconnectedness notwithstanding. As such, apart from natural calamities, any other human-induced coercive elements that force people to migrate demand as much cosmopolitan attention from people as the attention the dire condition of the victims
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itself demands. All this shows that even for diverse people in a pluralistic world, there are some universal aspirations, such as individual freedom to associate and be free from all forms of non-consented coercion. Furthermore, one would also contend that every individual human being has a universal aspiration of freely making decisions about his or her life in an autonomous way (though not in the sense of excluding relational aspects of being). Ultimately, any form of coercion that violates the freedom of the will of an individual is unacceptable. Forms of pluralism are tolerable insofar as they embody variant procedures of respecting individual autonomy, which—it must be conceded—is achieved in diverse ways and in no singular uniform way. Nevertheless, the ideal of individual autonomy as a moral ideal is non-negotiable. We should also not conflate respecting the autonomy of an individual as being submissive to respect for cultural pluralism because sometimes even where certain forms of fundamental human rights—except the right to life—are being undermined, the failure to demand respect for such is sometimes governed by pragmatic implications on the holding together of the society as there are fears that the social fabric may collapse if outsiders directly challenge systematic suppression of human rights. However, the migration issue shows us that human beings have some basic aspirations which when they fail to attain in their conflict or war ravaged society, the people seek hospitality elsewhere, not as a mere preference of taste, but to have their basic universal aspirations for self-actualisation, which every human being desires, realised. Understanding universalism as being valid and necessary would help to resolve some of the push factors that lead to refugee migration. Inasmuch as there are global factors that influence forced migration, it is also evident that there are human-induced situations resulting in governance and economic failures that lead to homelands of migrating refugees becoming hostile in terms of bare survival. While the number of conflicts in much of sub- Saharan Africa has greatly diminished as compared to three decades ago, sub-Saharan African youths have been among those that are taking the undignified and perilous migration to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea (Uchehara, 2016, p. 80). Should cosmopolitanism not demand that the destination countries of the refugees welcome them as a duty of hospitality? Conversely, should the homelands of the refugees, which have failed them due to political violence, corrupt regimes, poor governance and bad human rights records not be demanded to reform in the interest of the refugees who, all things being equal, would seek to migrate from
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their country? On what other basis would such a form of demand from external actors over a sovereign nation be legitimate if not on the basis of a cosmopolitan universalism contrary to what Todd (2010) avers?
Summary This chapter has elucidated cosmopolitanism in relation to Todd’s (2007) notion of judgements in educational encounters and the notion of cosmopolitics (Todd, 2010), which interrogates scripted forms of cosmopolitanism in education. Such a cosmopolitanism finds it inadequate to put their confidence in rules, roles and norms governing encounters in education on the assumption that such elements embed cosmopolitan values thus meeting cosmopolitan virtues. The challenge of this approach is that it ignores the individuality of the learner by focusing only on human commonalities since the rules, roles and norms are rooted in presupposed impartial detached abstract human beings. As universities are characteristically spaces where judgements are made, it is prudent that such judgements centre intersubjectivity. Cosmopolitan norms cannot be adequately served by mere performance of roles and compliance with rules. Centring intersubjectivity entails recognising indigenous knowledge for academic inquiry, recognising the value of local languages in instruction, and being mindful that the university culture, routines and teacher background are largely informed by a particularistic (not universal) dominant culture. Whilst the notions of objectivity and universalism when embedded in roles and rules and exclusively governing educational encounters are problematic, there is a need for caution in determining how to relate with universalism. The near absolute mistrust of universalism risks slipping into a universalism of anti-universalism. As this chapter has shown, global pluralism can be protected better and guaranteed if and when there is not only freedom and availability of space for cultures to flourish pluralistically. Even more important, is the ability for a culture to be open to criticism from outside. Common moral values are in this case indispensable.
References Arneson, R. J. (2016). Extreme cosmopolitanisms defended. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 19(5), 555–573. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity: Human rights in turbulent times. Cambridge: Polity.
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Brighouse, H. (2003). Should we teach patriotic history? In K. Mcdonough & W. Feinberg (Eds.), Citizenship and education in liberal-democratic societies: Teaching for cosmopolitan values and collective identities (pp. 157–174). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Chirwa, G., & Naidoo, D. (2014). Curriculum change and development in Malawi: A historical overview. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(16), 336–345. Code, L. (2012). Taking subjectivity into account. In C. W. Ruitenberg & D. C. Phillips (Eds.), Education, culture and epistemological diversity: Mapping a disputed terrain (pp. 85–100). Dordrecht: Springer. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Giroux, H. A. (2004). Critical pedagogy and the postmodern/modern divide: Towards a pedagogy of democratization. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31(1), 31–47. Habermas, J. (2001). The postnational constellation and the future of democracy. In M. Pensky (Ed.), The postnational constellation: Political essays (pp. 58–112). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2003). Toward a cosmopolitan Europe. Journal of Democracy, 14(4), 86–100. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. Malawi Government. (2013). Education Act. Malawi. Masina, L. (2014, August 21). Malawi schools to teach in English. Aljazeera. Retrieved January 1, 2018, from http://www.aljazeera.com/news/ africa/2014/08/malawi-schools-teach-english-local-debate-colonial-201482184041156272.html. Nili, S. (2015). Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist- cosmopolitan debate. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 18(3), 241–263. Nussbaum, M. (2002). Patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In M. C. Nussbaum & J. Cohen (Eds.), For love of country? (pp. 2–20). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Todd, S. (2007). Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan. Ethics and Education, 2(1), 25–38. Todd, S. (2010). Living in a dissonant world: Toward an agonistic cosmopolitics for education. Studies in Philosophy of Education, 29, 213–228. Uchehara, K. (2016). Sub-Saharan African countries and migration to Europe: Exploring the motivations, effects and solutions. Informatol, 49(1/2), 79–85.
CHAPTER 7
Centring Deliberation in Modern Educational Encounters
Abstract In this chapter, we propose that the rationale of cosmopolitan education developed in this book is constituted by a notion of justice. In reference to Amy Gutmann’s understanding of democratic justice, we analyse how cosmopolitan education manifests in educational encounters. Firstly, we argue that democratic justice implies equalising human encounters to the extent that people engage freely. Secondly, we contend that exercising one’s freedom cannot result in constrained human action whereby people are prevented to speak their minds. Rather, unlike Gutmann’s view that unjust speech should be constrained, we argue that speech should be reconfigured to deal with harmful speech in the way Judith Butler proposes. Thirdly, democratic justice should have the effect that people take into controversy one another’s taken-for-granted understandings. Through dissonance, human action would be poignantly poised to enacting just, cosmopolitan encounters. Keywords Cosmopolitan education • Justice • Democratic justice • Educational encounters • Equalising • Freedom • Human action • Unjust speech • Harmful speech • Dissonance • Cosmopolitan encounters
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Introduction Cognisant of how the modern world brings together a multiplicity of diversities, this chapter contends that educational encounters must be understood as encounters of difference. The chapter argues that encounters of difference in a university are constituted in much more than learner- learner or learner-teacher encounters, in other words, person-to-person encounters. Rather, there are person-institution encounters. Under such encounters, differences emerge when a person encounters non-person educational elements, such as the curriculum, pedagogy, educational aims and the institutional culture. These elements, as this chapter argues, embody subtle forms of hegemonic singular metaphysical or normative perspective seeking through institutionalism to dominate any other alternative perspective. Using Amy Gutmann’s (1999) and Gutmann and Thompson’s (1997) notion of deliberation among citizens in a democratic society as a means of preventing valid democratic systems, processes and institutions from perpetuating imbalances against those in the (demographic, cultural and economic) minority, the chapter contends that the different forms of covert passive assimilation in education can be identified and partly resolved if deliberation is centred in educational conceptualisation and practice.
Layers of Deliberation Based on Forms of Educational Encounters Among the central aims of education today is equipping learners with skills for democratic life that guarantees social justice. Yet, at the same time, education must itself be democratic if it is to be just and not replicate the subtle systematic forms of oppression of society. Looked at this way, it becomes evident that democracy shapes education, and education informs democracy (Sardoc, 2018, p. 250). What renders educational encounters a normative matter is the fact that such encounters involve the coming together of two moral and philosophical ideologies where one ideology usually seeks to dominate or have pre-eminence over the other. These encounters are in the forms of teacher-teacher, learner-learner and learner- teacher. However, more subtle yet forceful forms of encounters exist between a person and a non-person entity, which nevertheless is a powerful embodiment of a particular philosophical and moral outlook. Such encounters are expressed in a learner or teacher or community engaging
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another worldview in the curriculum, university routines as well as in pedagogy. In both principle and practice, such encounters usually demand conformism to the dominant and scarcely promoted hybridity. This being the case, deliberation in educational encounters involves engaging persons and non-person objects that embody actual peoples’ metaphysical and normative perspectives. Therefore, the objects of deliberation lie beyond human conduct. Global interconnectedness today necessitates education that is cosmopolitan in nature, among others implying that educational aims must not be restricted to the local or national horizon. The necessity for global or cosmopolitan education resides in both its normative value (so that a different other should be accorded moral dignity in terms that are intelligible and meaningful to the other), as well as in its pragmatic relevance. Pragmatically, modern life renders encountering and interacting with an other out of question, as those equipped with skills to manage encounters with others have a sure way of ensuring personal progress and building a respectful society. In other words, by equipping learners with universal skills, competences and knowledge that transcendent locality, modern education maximises the personal opportunities for individual flourishing. However, as is often highlighted (Divala, 2016; Mungwini, 2017; Ramose, 2010; Waghid, 2008), modern education tends to favour equipping learners with skills that are demanded on the global neo-liberal market. Primarily, education is aimed at developing skills that will maximise the economic interest of the individual, demanded to serve market demands. Ultimately, the framing of educational aims in educational curricula centres on and inordinately favours acquisition of individual skills that will attract economic benefit for the individual on the global market. Knowledge and skills that are aimed at cultivating one’s responsibilities to the community, and whose obligations are not restricted to individual rights or freedoms but also include, say, notions of care towards others, are de-emphasised and deemed to be pertaining to individual private preferences (Ramose, 2010). It is, however, evident that implied neglect of those skills, competences and knowledge aimed at collective life are de- emphasised since in the marketised model of modern of education (see Connell, 2013; Divala, 2016; Ramose, 2010) such are not translatable into economic gain. Put differently, configuration of educational aims in modern education is ultimately de-emphasised moral outlooks that are not largely individualistic and which conceive human nature beyond the Kantian transcendent self. This means that, for those communities across
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the globe that have to embrace modern education and which should be as competitive as the rest of the dominant developed world, attaining that aspiration is implicitly conditioned on making the education focus on metaphysical and moral conceptions of being human that are not necessarily almost entirely individualistic. The question of epistemology too is not straightforward as is usually assumed, especially in the modern context of a globalised world. The matter of what qualifies to be worthwhile knowledge—which by implication disqualifies alternative other forms of knowledge—is neither determined impartially nor independently of particularistic value influences (Mignolo, 2007). As such, educational encounters ought to take into consideration the likely marginalisation of other forms of knowledge that are divergent from the acceptable institutionalised mainstream one. This is mostly the case because knowledge construction and knowledge value are traceable to and anchored in particularistic metaphysical outlooks, such as about human nature, which are not in principle absolute. The particularistic metaphysical outlooks therefore influence valuation of knowledge. All this means that there is not only one absolute ideal conceptualisation of worthwhile knowledge. The modern preoccupation with neo-liberal models of epistemologies in education systematically suppresses alterative “subaltern” forms of knowledge. It is therefore imperative that education today, given its global or cosmopolitan dimension, be understood in terms of an encounter of difference. This will necessitate inclusion of hitherto maligned epistemologies in modern education that are largely based on a single hegemonic Kantian metaphysics. Related to the notion of epistemology is the question of university routines, practices and cultures. As Todd (2007) argues, relations that exist in educational spaces are generally informed by roles that themselves inhere and reinforce some forms of dominance as well as particularistic moral outlooks of the society. Furthermore, there is a tendency to design teacher- learner relations on the basis of the authoritative market models (Manthalu, 2019). Ultimately, certain meaningful transformative forms of relations in a university are not emphasised. Thus, the hegemonic culture and market values (Beets & Le Grange, 2005) shape institutional cultures and routines. Once educators are cognisant that institutional culture and routines are in principle encounters of difference, such elements of university life will not be regarded as impartial, inherently unproblematic and promoting equality, but rather that they have the capacity to foster the stifling of the otherness of those whose concrete being is different from the dominant outlook of the institution.
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Deliberation and Ideal Democracy and Justice By its nature, educational practice necessarily involves different forms of encounter. Such encounters are characteristically about embodiments of difference. For such educational encounters to be just they must necessarily be deliberative. As Gutmann (1999, p. xiii) observes: The willingness to deliberate about mutually binding matters distinguishes democratic citizens from self-interested citizens, who argue merely to advance their own interests, and deferential citizens, who turn themselves into passive subjects by failing to argue, out of deference to political authority. Justice is far more likely to be served by democratic citizens who reason together in search of mutually justifiable decisions than it is by people who are uninterested in politics or interested in it only for the sake of power.
It is apparent here that democratic deliberation occurs against a background of deep self- or group interests, institutionalised power imbalances that in principle compel one to resign to and conform to the dominant mainstream norms. Ultimately, such tacit conformism serves to retain and perpetuate the said imbalances. Since such imbalances are as old as society itself and comprise even the democratic structures on account of the concrete way of life of a people informing and shaping supposedly impartial institutions, they also inevitably manifest in educational institutions and educational encounters. This is mostly the case in modern times when the inevitable ties of global interconnectedness incessantly make encounters with otherness the new normal of twentyfirst century life. It is further instructive to realise that educational encounters, if not subject to deliberation, may serve to perpetuate the power imbalances among different people in subtle modes that often evade identification. This is more pronounced in developing countries, which have to keep pace with education for integration into the globalised world that is nevertheless actively shaped by few developing nations of the world. The end and means of education in most African nations, for instance, are largely alienated from the concrete African experiences (Waghid & Manthalu, 2019). In some respects, being educated in much of Africa is in principle, tantamount to depriving concrete African experiences of their negativity because they are incompatible with the hegemonic epistemological nature of modern education (Mungwini, 2016). This means the learner has to
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negotiate two worlds: an epistemological world and a normative world of his or her rootedness. In most cases, successful negotiation between these worlds requires in principle trampling down, and discarding and undermining the local or indigenous experiences as unworthy of epistemological value (Mignolo, 2007; Mungwini, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2017). It is inevitable that education today must be global in its scope since the human condition today is not restricted to local boundaries. However, the aspiration for cosmopolitan outlooks needs not be synonymised with exclusion of the local because on neither normative nor practical bases, can epistemologies necessarily be divorced from the concrete experiences of the people (Benhabib, 1992). This being the case, educational encounters in the form of encountering a fellow learner or teacher or encountering epistemologies and pedagogies in the university ought to be mindful of the hegemony of some perspective owing to the society being dominated by values, practices and outlooks of the majority of the population, or, by a hegemonic culture of the economically and technologically dominant who nevertheless have considerable influence over the affairs of society. Democratic deliberation would in this case aim at recognising the very high likelihood of the dominant groups not only having undue influence over what should be valued as knowledge and the way knowledge should be acquired under which norms, but in principle they also passively suppress forms of otherness from being expressed in the epistemologies, curriculum and pedagogy in the institution. Thus, the university is in reality a space where at different dimensions, differences encounter each other in increasingly subtle ways that are paraded as either impartial (hence, serving equality) or as what is necessarily indispensable in the enterprise of education. One can thus contend that meaningful democracy and justice are realised only when people are not only self-interested in maintaining the power imbalances they enjoy, as individuals or groups, where the privileges are somewhat insecure once the entitlements of others become a subject for consideration in social political affairs. Rather democracy and justice are achieved and meaningful when the forms of tacit oppression are identified and addressed. Educational practices cannot be oblivious to the subtleties of marginalisation, exclusion, oppression and assimilation that modern education and its practices not only embed but tacitly perpetuate. Calling for difference to be identified and normatively recognised in educational encounters is not necessarily asking for proportional representation of different cultures and perspectives that are involved in
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encounters for the sake of achieving a mathematical balance. Rather, demanding that educational encounters be responsive to difference is to demand that the concreteness of being human should not only be known by the mainstream metaphysical outlooks and epistemologies, but should be accorded space for flourishing because concrete difference is at the core of the constitution of the self-identity of the other. As Gutmann (1999, p. viii) argues, although the process of deliberation may not necessarily yield a consensus and resolution of challenges it nevertheless starkly recognises the mutual moral respect of one another among the deliberators. Put differently, mindful of the complexity of the human condition, it would be foolhardy to claim that once there is deliberation then equality will be achieved. Nevertheless, the deliberation process in whatever form and over whichever substance succeeds in achieving one crucial thing: it enables one to recognise the other, not in generalised terms (Benhabib, 2011) but rather in the context of how the otherness of the other is constitutive of his or her being; hence, if the other is to be recognised and respected as a moral being, difference should be at the heart of such consideration.
Deliberation and Education Deliberation is in principle the major purpose of democratic education, where deliberation entails consideration of reasons for it against a particular position (Gutmann, 1999, p. 52). Deliberation in education can be understood as a means for achieving education. Formulation of educational policy must itself be deliberative if it is to create capacity for deliberation in the university. As Gutmann observes (1999, p. 96), “educational policies can stifle the capacity and even the desire for deliberation.” The diversity that comes with educational encounters of difference in the modern world necessitates the cultivation of a sense and spirit of deliberation in the institution and in educational domains. Among others, the relevance of deliberation in educational domains is that deliberation would be a means of achieving education for all learners. The university sphere is fraught with different underlying forms of domination. Those learners whose concrete forms of being are different from those of the educational institutions are accorded an equitable opportunity to self-actualise without necessarily being required to extinguish the concrete forms of their being that are ostensibly incompatible with or unfavourable to the
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ainstream. Put differently, educational deliberation will ensure that legitm imate concrete forms of being human for the other should be centred on education to avoid an undue advantage or marginalisation of one form of educational perspective by another.
An End of Education: Towards Mutual Respect The second necessity for deliberation in education lies in the fact that education today is necessarily an encounter of differences. Besides assuming and performing their respective roles, students and teachers are first and foremost human beings worth of moral respect. According them, this moral respect is not something that is done by merely recognising them in generalised terms as transcendent selves who have exactly the same moral entitlements as all human beings that can be met by mere performance of certain duties towards the selves or refraining from doing certain things against the selves. Rather, as Benhabib (2011) highlights, respecting the other is about recognising the value of the subjectivities of the other. Establishing such value ought not to be borne out of mere projection, but rather out of interaction, where the other self-defines, outlining subjectivities that are indispensably constitutive of their being human. This entails that, in order to have educational encounters in educational domains that are respectful of the dignity of the other, interaction is of utmost primacy. Unless there is meaningful interaction between learners, between learners and teachers, among teachers, and between teachers and parents, there is a real threat of according moral respect to the dignity of the other in ways that in principle—although unintentionally—undermine the dignity of that other. This is because it is only deliberation that makes the otherness of the other be comprehended and accorded its due respect. Deliberation in the university also enables achievement of a more just democracy in the wider society. Arguably, even with the most stratified societies, educational institutions remain the topmost domain where ideologically constructed others—who would otherwise have very little or no chances of encountering each other—get to encounter one another. Meaningful and transformative democracy can be realised among others when “stereotypes or ideological constructions of the other” are encountered, “unmasked, destabilised and ultimately […] become undone” (Terblanche & Van der Walt, 2019, p. 213) in encounters of difference. Once learners are equipped with the concern, empathy and skills for comprehending and respectfully engaging with otherness in the university,
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there is room for promise that they would be agents of transformation in the wider society. Modern local and trans-local politics is characterised by difference. It is therefore imperative that learners develop capacities for recognising the worth of otherness lying in the subjectivities of the other that are often ignored as private and not demanding moral respect from those with whom one shares public life. Citizens with a deliberative attitude—whilst committed to the routines and norms of democratic life—are simultaneously aware of and ready to question particular democratic demands and norms if these threaten foundational democratic ideals, such as respect of persons (Gutmann, 1999, p. 52). An absence of the willingness to deliberate leaves those privileged by dominance, to “elevate their own interests into self-righteous causes, [as] traditionalists, who invoke established authority to subordinate their own reason to unjust causes” (Gutmann, 1999, p. 52). Apart from the home, the university occupies a large part of the domain that develops moral and democratic virtues in people (Gutmann, 1999, p. 52). As Gutmann (1999, p. 161) observes: [T]he perpetuation of any form of prejudice is a serious problem in a democracy because it blocks the development of mutual respect among citizens, but more serious still is the perpetuation of prejudice against an already disadvantaged minority, whose low economic and political position has been created in significant part by past de facto and de jure discrimination.
Why Deliberation in the University? Universities—both locally and in the global context—are a domain where inequalities and the exclusion of otherness are mostly cemented unless deliberate attention is given to the structured inequality. Moral dilemmas do not exist in controlled abstract environments. Rather, they occur in the context of suppositions about feasibility, and assumptions about human nature (Gutmann & Thompson, 1997, p. 14). The value of deliberation in democracy is that it “admits reasons and principles that are suitable for actual societies” (Gutmann & Thompson, 1997, p. 16). Actual deliberation is more advantageous than hypothetical agreement, according to Gutmann and Thompson (1997, p. 16) because— [I]t encourages citizens to face up to their actual problems by listening to one another’s moral claims rather than concluding (on the basis of only a
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thought experiment) that their fellow citizens would agree with them on all matters of justice if they were all living in an ideal society.
Deliberation “brings into the open legitimate moral dissatisfactions that would be suppressed by other ways of dealing with disagreement [difference]. Deliberative democracy seeks not consensus for its own sake but rather a morally justified consensus” (Gutmann & Thompson, 1997, p. 16). For Gutmann and Thompson (1997, p. 17), deliberative democracy does not always entail that outcomes of the deliberative process will be just. However, it shows that one gets as near as possible to the just outcome. Put differently, actual deliberation must be cognisant of how endemic imbalances in power relations are across societies and how difficult it is to get to terms of engagement that are mutually fair or that really help to bring out the voices of the systematically marginalised.
Beyond the University: Deliberation with the Trans- local and Global Discrimination and inequality in the university are directly connected to the economic, political, global and technological deprivation of the marginalised locally or globally. Either reforms in the university need to be connected with simultaneous reforms outside the institution, or the reforms in the institution should be directed towards the wider society as one project, otherwise the reforms will only be cosmetic. The need for widely encompassing reforms, challenges for efforts of racial integration, respect for other races and an end to prejudice in the university are usually thwarted because students stay in segregated communities and neighbourhoods and only encounter each other in the lecture rooms (Gutmann, 1999, p. 162). In as far as cultivation of attitudes of equality and mutual respect are concerned the educational domains can be either spaces of opportunity for correcting the social condition or sites of replication of moral inequalities and prejudices, depending on the presence of deliberation in the institutional encounters. The lack of deliberative encounters among diverse students as embodiments of aspects of the mainstream and prejudiced metaphysical outlooks does not only deprive of an opportunity to deconstruct social injustice and oppression, but also perpetuates prejudices that the hegemonic metaphysical orientation of public institutions has towards the oppressed in a society.
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The nature and extent of global interconnectedness today necessitate deliberation in the domains of education. Just as educators are conscious today that being educated demands having trans-local awareness, knowledge and skills, it becomes prudent for the education project to consider the marginalisation threats and disadvantages of local experiences face in regular educational encounters where the mainstream ultimately seeks to extinguish the sources of concreteness of the other, merely on the basis of otherness. In other words, it is erroneous and normatively inconsequential to consider the modern global order, its education systems and institutions as being unproblematic and the agents for global harmony and global equality. The reality, however, is that due to a complexity of internal and external factors in terms of the nations of the world, the global order is characteristically unequal. Besides, the order is also tilted towards the rich nations of the world whose metaphysical outlooks dominate conceptualisations of education. While global forces are increasingly bringing people together, there still remain challenges of fearing the other, of grand narratives in education, which passively exclude alternative ones owing to their locality or “subjectivity.” While the university holds some promise to achieve deliberation owing to its ability to enable encounters between others who would ordinarily not encounter each other owing to how their constructed ideologies limit the chances and spaces for their encountering each other, it is important to realise that the university too needs concerted political support from the public sphere to ensure that the spirit of deliberation is cultivated in the institution and that it extends to the wider society. The university is not an island that is detached from a controlled environment. In practice, the university is a collection of ideologies, norms, values and aspirations of the wider society. It is, therefore, expected that the university will likely mirror the inequalities that exist in society. While globally, some few nations inform and shape the global economic, legal and political agendas in terms of being closely reflective of their particularistic aspirations, the majority of nations are on the receiving end and must only integrate or embrace what is on offer, in principle bringing far too little to the so-called hybridisation of globalisation. It is in this vein that educational aims and epistemologies either exclude experiences of least powerful nations or are dominated by the experiences of the powerful. While in most cases, the burden of ensuring equality is placed on the developed or powerful nations, it is imperative to highlight that even the weak nations are significant active agents towards their own marginalisation. Challenges of poor political governance are clear instances of
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how most developed nations collude in their own marginalisation in collaboration with global forces. Most African nations, for example, fare badly when it comes to governance (Appiah-Nyameky Sannye, Logan, & Gyimah-Boadi, 2019; Sadhiska & Isbell, 2019). Whilst one would counter-argue that the bad economic condition of the majority is the cause of poor political governance, which is characterised by under- representation and participation of the majority, or where attempts are made, the involvement of citizens is calculatively aimed at being uncritical and paternalistic. African nations will only get out of this problem once their economic condition improves. Such criticisms however ignore that a position like this puts nations in a vicious cycle: their bad economic condition is largely a result of poor political governance that yields unfavourable economic conditions (Moyo, 2009). The challenge of political mal- governance is that it is insensitive to the under-representation of the interests of the majority. Legitimate concerns, especially metaphysical and epistemological assumptions the majority would aspire to have represented in the education, cannot be authentically articulated as the people are disempowered (Freire, 2014). Such peoples are only given an education that will cement their role in society and does not demand transformation (Freire, 2014). Given this background, one can therefore argue that achieving deliberation in education for difference, especially in the global dimensions of education, must necessarily and simultaneously demand a transformation of the political condition of the people. Whilst there are external globalist forces that perpetuate global inequalities, it is instructive to note that there is also active agency of developing nations that significantly puts them in positions of disadvantaged-ness having little bargaining power. As such, if education today, which is necessarily global in one dimension, is to be just in the context of the inevitable encounters of differences, the political character of developing nations is a necessary condition for there to be a participatory and representative deliberation in educational encounters that serves the collective aspirations of all the people involved irrespective of their disadvantaged-ness. Although university education cannot completely substitute the role of society through its civil society institutions, the university is nevertheless a privileged domain for reducing stigma towards otherness (Gutmann, 1999, p. 164).
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Summary Educational encounters are encounters of difference. Just education is that which does not seek to achieve either conformism or assimilation of those participating in it. However, the conceptualisation and practice of education (today) inheres and perpetuates forms of domination in diverse subtle ways. This is why the notion of deliberation as the refiner of education must extend to the domain of education, particularly today when education is both hegemonic and based on a singular other-excluding narrative. The challenge for educators is not so much what should be included or not in educational imagination and practice. Rather, the contentious element is for other voices to be recognised and accorded space in a cosmopolitan world.
References Appiah-Nyameky Sannye, J., Logan, C., & Gyimah-Boadi, E. (2019). In search of opportunity: Young and educated Africans most likely to consider moving abroad. Afrobarometer Dispatch, 288, 1–32. Beets, P., & Le Grange, L. (2005). ‘Africanising’ assessment practices: Does the notion of ubuntu hold any promise? South African Journal of Higher Education, 19, Special Issue, 1197–1207. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity: Human rights in turbulent times. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99–112. Divala, J. J. (2016). Re-imaging a conception of ubuntu that can recreate relevant knowledge cultures in Africa and African universities. Knowledge Cultures, 4(4), 90–103. Freire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education: With a new preface and epilogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (1997). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Manthalu, C. H. (2019). An ubuntu approach to addiction-response framework in Malawian schools. In Y. Ndasauka & G. M. Kayange (Eds.), Addiction in South and East Africa: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 71–90). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Mignolo, W. E. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2/3), 155–167. Moyo, D. (2009). Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. London: Penguin. Mungwini, P. (2016). The question of recentring Africa: Thoughts and issues from the global South. South African Journal of Philosophy, 35(4), 523–536. Mungwini, P. (2017). ‘African know thyself’: Epistemic injustice and the quest for liberative knowledge. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies— Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 12(2), 5–18. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2017). The emergence and trajectories of struggles for an ‘African university’: The case of unfinished business of African epistemic decolonisation. Kronos, 43(1), 51–77. Ramose, M. B. (2010). The death of democracy and the resurrection of timocracy. Journal of Moral Education, 39(3), 291–303. Sadhiska, B., & Isbell, T. (2019). Almost half of Malawians consider emigration; most-educated are most likely to look overseas. Afrobarometer Dispatch, 281, 1–9. Sardoc, M. (2018). Democratic education at 30: An interview with Dr. Amy Gutmann. Theory and Research in Education, 16(2), 244–252. Terblanche, J., & Van der Walt, C. (2019). Leaning into discomfort: Engaging film as a reflective surface to encourage deliberative encounters. In C. H. Manthalu & Y. Waghid (Eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonisation in Africa (pp. 204–224). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Todd, S. (2007). Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan. Ethics and Education, 2(1), 25–38. Waghid, Y. (2008). The public role of the university reconsidered. Perspectives in Education, 26(1), 19–25. Waghid, Y., & Manthalu, C. H. (2019). Decoloniality as democratic change within higher education. In C. H. Manthalu & Y. Waghid (Eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonization in Africa (pp. 47–68). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
CHAPTER 8
On Cosmopolitanism Through Deliberative Education Extended: Beyond Moral Respect
Abstract In this chapter, we draw specifically on the views of Marianna Papastephanou, who has reservations about some of the attributes that are often associated with cosmopolitanism. In the main, we argue that there is an inherent connection between cosmopolitanism and democracy. We discuss the possible implication of cosmopolitanism, as viewed by Papastephanou, for education. We specifically focus on deliberative education, which could be described as education that is concerned with pedagogical practices that incorporate encounters with the other. An appropriate response, we argue, would be to incorporate teaching and learning pedagogical practices that create the space to notice societal injustice globally through the recognition of the other. Such pedagogical practices could be, for example ubuntu-inspired practices that explore diversity and vulnerability; research focused on lived community-related problems; allowing for the development of critical skills through student participation; the development of care through deliberation; practices that include moral imagination by utilising learning material from the humanities; and lastly, practices that draw on the embodied knowledge of the students. Such deliberative education could cultivate in students the required compassion, care, imagination and responsibility towards the other—for the immediate other and the faceless other—and towards social justice. Through such deliberative education, cosmopolitanism could, to a greater degree, reflect the essence of being eccentric and ethico-political.
© The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2_8
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Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Democracy • Deliberative education • Pedagogical practices • Encounters • Teaching • Learning • Societal injustice • Other • Ubuntu-inspired practices • Diversity • Vulnerability • Community • Critical skills • Student participation • Care • Deliberation • Moral imagination • Embodied knowledge • Responsibility
Introduction As a concept, cosmopolitanism has drawn criticism from many philosophers of education—especially when cosmopolitanism is perceived from a narrow perspective as referring to world travellers and globalised individuals. Perhaps a less contentious explanation as reference point could be that “cosmopolitanism is about the extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organizations and institutions” (Delanty, 2012a, p. 3). This particular explanation implies an openness to the present “unknown,” the who (and all of his or her humanity) that is not yet familiar. This required openness, which could be perceived as an unattainable ideal, demands an improvement of social justice as a lived reality for all of humanity. It is often precisely that “not-yet” position, whether it refers to the not-yet familiar individual or the not-yet socially just world, that draws criticism from scholars. In this chapter, we draw specifically on the views of Marianna Papastephanou, who has reservations about some of the attributes that are often associated with cosmopolitanism. We start the discussion by analysing cosmopolitanism as depicted through the seminal work of Papastephanou (2012), Thinking differently about cosmopolitanism: Theory, eccentricity and the globalised world. Following on from these initial thoughts on cosmopolitanism, we incorporate the views of other scholars, for example, Delanty (2012a, 2012b), with those of Papastephanou. Delanty (2012a), for instance, argues that there is an inherent connection between cosmopolitanism and democracy. In the last section of the chapter, we discuss the possible implication of cosmopolitanism, as viewed by Papastephanou (2012), for education. We specifically focus on deliberative education in an extended fashion, which transcends mere moral respect and agreement, which could be described as education that is concerned with pedagogical practices that incorporate encounters with the other. As Terblanche and Van der Walt (2019, p. 203) state,
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“[w]ithin pedagogical scholarship concerned with the imperative for social transformation the importance and vital nature of deliberative encounters, especially with those considered other, have been highlighted and proposed as a tool to facilitate change.” Having briefly provided a framework for this chapter, the next section addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism as depicted by Papastephanou (2012).
Cosmopolitanism Beyond Moral Respect In Papastephanou’s (2012, p. 1) seminal work Thinking differently about cosmopolitanism: Theory, eccentricity and the globalised world; she introduces two concepts to the scholarly debate surrounding cosmopolitanism, namely “eccentric” and “ethico-political.” In addition, Papastephanou (2012) objects against the perceived view that cosmopolitanism is associated only with a so-called “world-traveller.” This view portrays world- travellers as individuals who appear to function comfortably (outwardly) in various countries, frequently crossing international borders, and who seemingly embrace the globalised world as current reality. In the following paragraphs, we discuss each of these three aspects. Firstly, according to Papastephanou (2012, p. 1), cosmopolitanism that is “eccentric,” can be elucidated as a capacity that “decenters the self, cultivates centrifugal virtues, and questions the inflated concern for the globally enriched self.” This ability, Papastephanou (2012) avers, is dependent on an individual’s skill or capacity to engage critically with his or her own embedded values, beliefs and particular worldview. What transpires through cosmopolitanism that is eccentric, is a transition from focusing only on the self to focusing on both the self and the other. Simply put, one could argue that the focus shifts from an individual perspective to that of a collective or communal perspective. In this instance, a collective or communal perspective refers to the whole of humanity and, in particular, social justice as a lived reality for all. Secondly, in terms of cosmopolitanism that is “ethico-political” and building on to being “eccentric,” Papastephanou (2012) introduces a moral or ethical dimension to her argument. Papastephanou (2012) questions the extent of individuals’ ethical responsibility towards the condemnation of unjust practices affecting all of humanity. Papastephanou (2012) argues that, only by creating space within oneself by means of decentring of the self, the possibility exists for individuals to become aware of, have concern for, and act ethically in response to recognised injustices. Thirdly, Papastephanou (2012) states
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that cosmopolitanism is primarily the crossing of internal borders—that is the confined constraints of the self—rather than the crossing of external borders, such as those of different countries. Only through challenging one’s own values or motives is one able to change one’s thinking about and treatment of those other than oneself (Papastephanou, 2012). Consequently, Papastephanou (2012) reasons that, irrespective of where one is located in the world, being concerned about the effect of unethical and unjust practices against humanity, encapsulates the essence of decentring the self. In this way, space has been opened up for the possible transformation of the individual and therefore for the becoming of a socially just world citizen. Apart from the three concepts—that of being “eccentric,” “ethico- political” and the crossing of internal borders—Papastephanou (2012) also argues that an ideal cosmopolitanism can only be realised through the act of care. Caring that shifts from only caring for the self to caring for both the self and the other, is moral. Ethical or moral caring, Papastephanou (2012) contends, firstly takes responsibility for the impact of individuals’ actions on all of humanity and the planet. Consideration is therefore required: consideration of the effect of one’s own (and any other individual’s) decisions and actions on another, but ultimately also on the collective—all of humanity—as well as on the planet. Our present decisions might very well affect the continued existence of future inhabitants of our planet. Secondly, ethical or moral caring should include sensitivity towards the past or the memory of the past (Papastephanou, 2012). Perhaps one could argue that the discounting of atrocities and unjust practices of the past might impede the healing of individuals. Such an impediment might in fact perpetuate such pain. Thirdly, caring in such a moral way should include openness to diversity—that is openness to different cultures, different norms and different values (Papastephanou, 2012). Openness in such a way delays judgement, recognises those different from oneself, and is willing to enter into meaningful dialogue. Lastly, Papastephanou (2012) argues that caring for all of humanity in a moral or ethical way, needs to incorporate possible redress initiatives. Here, she refers to initiatives that can address economic inequality and injustice still prevailing in modern societies, in addition to initiatives which can preserve the sustainability of our future planet, which is facing possible depletion of scarce and finite resources. In this section, we have provided a short summary of some of the thoughts on cosmopolitanism as perceived by Papastephanou in her semi-
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nal work of 2012. In the next section, we discuss Papastephanou’s subsequent thoughts on cosmopolitanism, using cosmopolitanism that is “eccentric” and “ethico-political” as foundation.
Cosmopolitanism Beyond an Ethical Response In the previous section, it was established that Papastephanou (2012) argues for a broader definition of cosmopolitanism, which is both “eccentric” and “ethico-political.” This understanding epitomises a shift in the interior dimension of the soul of an individual and portrays a particular dimension of moral care. In this section, we elaborate on these foundational thoughts through a discussion pertaining to three further aspects of a notion of cosmopolitanism. For Delanty (2012a, p. 3) there is a strong connection between cosmopolitanism and democracy as he states, “[c]osmopolitanism concerns ways of imaging the world and thus it is more than a condition of mobility or transnational movement. It is particularly bound up with the expansion of democracy and the extension of the space for the political.” The political is undeniably intertwined with social justice and possible social cohesion as a lived experience for humanity (Marchetti, 2012). Similar to democracy, Papastephanou (2017a) argues that cosmopolitanism carries only possibilities and no certainty within; there is no guarantee of transformation or a socially just world. Delanty (2012a, p. 4) agrees with this statement by arguing that one should view cosmopolitanism in degrees rather than a goal or outcome achieved or missed, for instance, the “orientation towards openness and closure.” This lack of guarantee occurs because there often is reluctance by the self to reflect, and without reflection, the possibility of taking responsibility diminishes (Papastephanou, 2017a). Papastephanou (2017a, p. 1339), phrases the risk as, “the self remains the immovable centre and simultaneously the primum movens from which emanates all reflection on responsibility” (original italics). The ideal cosmopolitanism or ideal democracy—differently described as the possibility of a socially just lived reality for humanity—is therefore dependent on individuals. Simply put, it is more than policies or legislations or frameworks imposed by authoritative power, as a just humanity becomes tangible through the decisions, behaviour and applied pressure on authorities by individuals. The essential feature of self-transformation is therefore intrinsic to achieving a degree of the ideal cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2012b).
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Papastephanou (2017a) argues that individuals often only consider possible responsibility after a deliberative interruption of their daily lives, for instance, such as when refugees endeavour to gain access into their country. The ideal cosmopolitanism, which is ethico-political though, should consider the plight of all of humanity (for example, those staying behind in a war-torn country) and not just refugees of whom one became aware when they entered one’s country (Papastephanou, 2017a). In reference to the views of Dewey (2001) contained in Democracy and education, Papastephanou (2017b) focuses on the possibility of renewal by humans, which assists in humans’ self-preservation ability. She contends that renewal of individuals’ inner being is precisely what we require for a just cosmopolitan world (Papastephanou, 2017b). This renewal of the interior, Papastephanou (2017b, p. 12) argues, requires a particular attitude of “open-mindedness [that] sometimes depends on knowledge.” Papastephanou (2017b, p. 12) further argues that this required attitude of being open to diversity cannot be cultivated “without a different and richer relation to obtaining knowledge.” This is an important concept as it directly links ideals of cosmopolitanism to those of education. In the civilised world, several atrocities are frequently committed by humans against one another and against the planet. Some of these, such as terror attacks, are visible and create a particular response (Papastephanou, 2018). Other atrocities seem more subtle, for instance, damage to the environment, inequality or inhumane working conditions, and a suitable ethical response to provide a sustainable solution is often lacking due to a refusal to do reflection and accept responsibility for decisions made (often business decisions), (Spector, 2015). Subsequently, Papastephanou (2018) uses terror attacks as an example to explain the particular requirements that an ideal cosmopolitanism requires from humanity. Firstly, Papastephanou (2018, p. 9) asks whether, instead of retaliating to terror by engaging in further violence and the implementation of additional security or protective measures, we should not rather consider a “resourceful ethico-political imagination that cultivates new interest in and critical engagement with political global realities.” In engaging with current realities, new meaning and new insight is gained, which could aid in arriving at a just and ethical future that is not yet a present reality (Papastephanou, 2018). This, however, requires a particular imagination of a not-yet socially just society without terror attacks, and an authentic honesty about our own contributions to the volatile world (Papastephanou, 2018). From
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our perspective, this notion of unprecedented response to a terror attack, resonates with the views of Michel Foucault (1995) in his book Discipline and punish: Birth of the prison. Foucault (1995) argues that it is not possible to legislate behaviour in order to eradicate lawlessness. Civilised society has laws and those that contravene these laws are punished through the penal system; however, the result is not an automatic reduction in transgressions or transgressors (Foucault, 1995). Similarly, an increase in security protocols or protective measures as a response to terror attacks might not result in a safer tomorrow or the elimination of the possible threat of a future attack. Perhaps, as Papastephanou (2018) suggests, greater understanding of or insight into the cause of the possible threat of a future terror attack might result in a different outcome than the current futile response with the same outcome of more violence as answer to violence. Secondly, Papastephanou (2018, p. 10) argues that a particular sense of “globalised togetherness” is experienced and felt in the aftermath of a terror attack. In that moment, therefore, one could argue that fellow humans are recognised for their shared humanity. For a brief moment, difference or diversity fades in the bright light of the relational. In line with Papastephanou’s (2012) seminal thoughts on cosmopolitanism that should be “eccentric,” the self indeed decentres to create space for the other in that shared moment of relational humanity, when still reeling from the horror and devastation of a terror attack. In this section, we have included thoughts on “eccentric ethico- political” cosmopolitanism as perceived by Papastephanou (2012) and, in addition, substantiated these views with those of other scholars in the field, such as Delanty (2012a, 2012b). The key thoughts—concerning cosmopolitanism that is “eccentric” and “ethico-political”—can be enumerated as follows: • particular decentring of the self, which is required in order to be open to the other; • moral or ethical response to injustice; • transition or transformation of the internal borders of the self; • moral or ethical notion of care; • moral or ethical imagination; and • recognition of the relational dimension entrenched in a shared humanity.
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In the next section, we discuss the possible effect of considering these key thoughts surrounding “eccentric ethico-political” cosmopolitanism on education, specifically deliberative education.
Eccentric Ethico-political Cosmopolitanism in Conjunction with Deliberative Education “Eccentric ethico-political” cosmopolitanism requires a particular ethical attitude from individuals. The question remains, how, if at all, could this ethical attitude be cultivated? In the following six sub-sections we discuss the possible ways in which deliberative education could advance a defensible “eccentric ethico-political” cosmopolitanist cause. Deliberative Education: Towards a Particular Decentring of the Self Papastephanou (2012) argues that a particular transition is required, from focus on the self to that of the collective (community) perspective and a concern for societal justice for humanity (and the planet). Such a transition cannot follow a predetermined script, framework or plan (Stevenson, 2002), and therefore cultivating or embedding the underlying values for such a transition becomes complicated. Education that wishes to contribute to this possible transition, from only the self to both the self and the other, requires deliberative pedagogical interventions. Such inclusion of (all) others, Papastephanou (2019, p. 305) warns, even though it is essential to the ideal of ethico-political, that it “should not be utopianized” as even “inclusion” requires reflexivity. As such, the African notion of ubuntu, employed as a pedagogical strategy, could assist in creating an appropriate environment for fostering a collective or community perspective through a practice of reflection. Muyingi (2013, p. 566) explains an ubuntu connection between the community perspective and the possibility of social justice for all of humanity as follows: Ubuntu stands for a communitarian morality. The goal of that morality is dignity, reached through personal growth and fulfilment. The participation of the community is the essential means to personal dignity; hence, this participation is the motive and fulfilment of the process of morality.
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Ubuntu pedagogical practices utilised should therefore create moments where a diverse student body could, together, thus “in association with others, and engaging and justifying one’s understandings in their presence” (Waghid, 2018a, p. 7), explore the otherness (and rich diversity) in themselves and in the other. Cosmopolitanism, Stevenson (2002) argues, necessitates citizens (students) who have been exposed to conditions that “allowed for the negotiation of the self in relation to others, the discovery of cultural plurality and difference, and the opening up of more cosmopolitan horizons and our interconnections with nature”. Deliberative education, inclusive of ubuntu-inspired pedagogical practices as envisioned by Waghid (2018a) above, could provide suitable conditions for the attentiveness of our interconnectedness. Waghid (2018b, p. 60) further posits, “an encounter framed through Ubuntu is a responsible action in the sense that people recognise one another’s vulnerabilities and actually do something about changing what people experience.” Simply put, through this togetherness, relationships could be fostered that allow the opening up of space for the other. Through ubuntu-inspired pedagogical practices, deliberative education could contribute to Papastephanou’s (2012) vision of the essential decentring of the self. Deliberative Education: Towards a Moral or Ethical Response to Injustice Papastephanou (2012) purports cosmopolitanism that is “ethico- political,” requires that people assume a moral or ethical responsibility in response to any form of global injustice. Such a possible response therefore necessitates individuals to be aware of or notice injustice. Therefore, the particular moral or ethical response required could be the notion of a prescriptive morality. Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, and Hepp (2009, p. 533) report on two orientations of morality, namely proscriptive morality, which is inhibition-based, sensitive to negative outcomes, and focused on what we should not do. In contrast, prescriptive morality is activation-based, sensitive to positive outcomes, and focused on what we should do. Proscriptive morality reflects an avoidance-based motivational system, whereas prescriptive morality reflects an approach-based motivational system. ‘Ethico-political’ cosmopolitanism requires an active response to global injustice and therefore the question remains, how can education contribute to the cultivation of a prescriptive morality? One such deliberative education pedagogical practice could be that of research that is
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concerned with lived societal problems. Le Grange (2012) and Mahlomaholo (2014) argue that research that is focused on current societal difficulties, contributes to a moral dimension to education and even possible future social cohesion. The future impact on society, due to students being involved in communal problem-specific research, could be significant as interconnectedness (between individuals and between people and the planet’s finite resources) is demonstrated through such research (Le Grange, 2012). To our mind, research in this way, could result in people being made aware of injustice and subsequent ownership of responsibility of injustice. It might be possible that individuals who assume responsibility, who respond to injustice on a local level, are enticed to fight for justice for all of humanity. Perhaps though, through the solving of local societal problems, the plight of the voiceless and faceless marginalised around the globe, are heard. Zipin (2017, p. 75) describes the possible benefit of problem-focused deliberative research as follows, “[s]uch lived problems can spur powerful spontaneous thought in the conceptual repertoires of students’ and even the wider community.” Through research that is focused on lived societal (or environmental) problems, deliberative education could contribute to Papastephanou’s (2012) vision of the self, adopting a moral or ethical responsibility for global injustice. Deliberative Education: Towards a Transition of Internal Borders of the Self According to Papastephanou (2012), cosmopolitanism that is eccentric ethico-political, requires that individuals consider certain intrinsic beliefs and perspectives. Foucault (1980) argues that individuals and knowledge are influenced and formed through a particular social and historic context, the intersection with other individuals and the situated power relations. These intrinsic beliefs and perspectives that should be taken into account therefore require a willingness by the self to reflect critically on the constituted self. Nussbaum (2006, p. 388) argues: [Critical self-reflection implies] a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs, statements, and arguments, and accepts only those that survive reason’s demand for consistency and for justification.
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Pedagogical practices used should aim to engender in students the ability of critical thinking and self-reflection, and Boulton and Lucas (2011, p. 2511) argue that the purpose of education is that: [Students] are taught to question interpretations that are given to them, to reduce the chaos of information to the order of an analytical argument. They are taught to seek out what is relevant to the resolution of a problem; they learn progressively to identify problems for themselves and to resolve them by rational argument supported by evidence; and they learn not to be dismayed by complexity but to be capable and daring in unraveling it.
The particular contribution of deliberative education towards this inner consideration of constituted borders lies in the how of the pedagogical practices. Boulton and Lucas (2011) therefore argue for pedagogy that allows students to derive at meaning for themselves. Clearly, such pedagogy will resist a strategy where the so-called “master” (educator) purely transfers knowledge to the student. An appropriate pedagogy will instead require student participation in the learning process, by evaluating the merits of the knowledge, by deliberating arguments, and by deriving new alternatives from present realities. Often, in order to facilitate learning that requires student participation, the teaching strategy should incorporate learning material stemming from the humanities or arts fields (Nussbaum, 2006). Through teaching and learning pedagogical practices that are focused on incorporating student participation and the subsequent inclusion of learning material that invoke an emotional response (such as a poem), deliberative education could contribute to Papastephanou’s (2012) vision that the self needs to traverse internally constituted borders. Deliberative Education: Towards a Moral or Ethical Notion of Care Papastephanou (2012) powerfully argues that moral or ethical care is a prerequisite for ideal cosmopolitanism. Deliberative education should therefore aim to cultivate care in students, a moral or ethical care for the globally other and the planet. Waghid (2007, p. 587) contends that moral or ethical care “recognises the rights of others to universal hospitality.” Waghid and Smeyers (2012, p. 15) explain hospitality as “[t]he very act of treating another person with hospitality determines the personhood of the
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[o]ther and simultaneously gives another a passage into one’s humanity— that is, seeing one as a human being who merits being treated hospitably.” How then, can education contribute to fostering an attitude of respect and recognition of another? Papastephanou (2013) argues that such pedagogy should include a reflection on the past. In essence, she argues that the ideal cosmopolitanism requires a forward-looking dream of the not-yet socially just world, but equally so a looking-back as the future social cohesion might be dependent on the redress of past actions and consequences (Papastephanou, 2013). Nkomo (2013, p. 8) concurs, “[m]emory is crucial to facilitating a healthy understanding of the ravages of oppression, both for the formerly oppressed and for those who, knowingly or not, were beneficiaries of the nefarious discriminatory policies.” Listening to the other, with subsequent reflection, could therefore be an influential teaching practice, as through listening to another’s experience in and of the past (or current), new knowledge could be constructed. The memory of the past, Vosloo (2005) argues, should have one aim and that is to disrupt the present for purposes of a better tomorrow. Listening to another implies that deliberation is used as a pedagogical practice. Deliberation, to be constituted as part of a deliberative encounter, Davids and Waghid (2019, p. 2) contend, “is dependent on elocution, listening and re-elocutions.” Simply put, it requires a listening and a reflection to such an extent that one is willing to re-consider one’s initial stance. Deliberation in this manner necessitates that students believe that they could affect the outcome of the teaching and learning practice and, subsequently, a feeling of worth is created (Davids & Waghid, 2019). Terblanche and Van der Walt (2019, p. 211) argue, in response to Volf (1996) and Waghid (2018a) that “the pre-requisite for encounter is the willingness to show up, to present yourself and to reveal something of your vulnerability to the other.” This openness to vulnerability could be what is required to ignite compassion towards the other, and such compassion could lead to an ethical responsibility towards injustice (Terblanche & Van der Walt, 2019). Deliberation as teaching and learning strategy could therefore assist in the cultivation of individuals who are willing to care compassionately, which is caring in a moral or ethical manner, for humanity and the planet at large.
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Deliberative Education: Towards a Moral or Ethical Imagination Papastephanou (2018) argues for cosmopolitanism that can respond to terror attacks (or other more subtle atrocities) in a new, yet-unimaginable, way—rather deliberation and critical reflection than retaliated violence. For this to happen, Papastephanou (2018) argues for an attitude of moral imagination. Davids and Waghid (2019, p. 45) contend that educational encounters have “the potential not only to invite new visions and imaginings but also to imagine a yet-to-be perceived world.” Similarly, to Papastephanou (2018) who argues that more stringent security measures (in response to a terror attack) do not equate to a safer world, for Vosloo (2003, p. 66), this moral imagination is intertwined with hospitality as he reasons, the challenge posed by the moral crisis does not merely ask for tolerance and peaceful co-existence or some abstract plea for community, but for an ethos of hospitality. The opposite of cruelty and hostility is not simply freedom from the cruel and hostile relationship, but hospitality. Vosloo (2003) therefore argues for something greater than the mere absence of hostility, that is, the opening up to the perceived enemy other (terror). This is in line with Papastephanou’s (2018) vision of reflection on and deliberating with the other about the origin of these violent terror attacks. Waghid, Waghid, and Waghid (2018, p. 21) maintain, “we have to listen to what the other has to say, even if the other’s views are abominable (detestable and atrocious).” This reverberates the views of Marais (2014, p. 712) who states, “the life stories of those who have been oppressed are heard and reflected upon, because these stories hold the potential for transformation of both the oppressed and their oppressors.” Imagining a future with no violence and no atrocities committed, requires a particular willingness to engage with the perpetrators, especially to find the source, the root cause, of the cycle of violence. Nussbaum (2002, 2006) argues that pedagogical practices nurturing the imagination become therefore of importance as only through imagining a different tomorrow, can hope be instilled, and possibly result in different present-day actions. The reading (or writing) of poetry or the showing of a film as learning material (or pedagogy) are examples of deliberative educational encounters that could result in imagination to be ignited (Nussbaum, 2002, 2006; Terblanche & Van der Walt, 2019). Pedagogy, which therefore entices students to imagine new alternatives, could contribute to the notion of cosmopolitanism, that is ethico-imaginative.
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Deliberative Education: Towards Recognition of the Relational Dimension Papastephanou (2018) describes a particular globalised togetherness as a consequence in the aftermath of a terror attack. This notion of togetherness could be attributed to an awareness of the sense of relationality between individuals—between the self and the other (Papastephanou, 2013). This relationality happens abruptly due to the experience of the terror attack—a deliberative encounter so to speak. Whereas Volf (1996) explains a slowly evolving kind of deliberate encounter, when he uses a depiction of the act of two people embracing each other, to illustrate poignantly the required openness towards another, which is required for the recognition of relationality. Volf (1996, p. 141) explains the workings of a deliberative encounter in a safe space as follows: Open arms are a gesture of the body reaching for the other. They are a sign of discontent with my own self-enclosed identity, a code of desire for the other. I do not want to be myself only; I want the other to be part of who I am and I want to be part of the other. More than just a code for desire, open arms is a sign that I have created space in myself for the other to come in and that I have made a movement out of myself to enter the space created by the other.
We are not suggesting that an abrupt or unethical or unsafe deliberative encounter is a compulsory pedagogical practice to engender in students the ability to recognise in the other their shared humanity. Rather, some vexation is required, in order for the possible transformation to ensue, but such rupturing should only occur in a controlled and safe learning space. This vexation might imply the acceptance of new knowledge, knowledge that is therefore different from the constituted knowledge that engraved the internal borders of the self. Papastephanou (2017b, p. 12) rightly asks, “[w]hat kind of learning by un-doing might be relevant?” and continues by stating that this new knowledge might be only be obtained through “uncomfortable knowledge acquisition.” An appropriate pedagogical practice that therefore could be used is that of drawing unto the embodied knowledge of the student. Embodied knowledge could be described as follows: “humans’ psychologies and emotions are made up through practices that are significantly shaped by power relations that have been internalised into the body through active engagement with social-structural relation” (Fataar, 2018, p. 601). The pedagogical practice, such as stu-
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dents viewing a sculpture or students writing a poem about a painful situation, could result in bearing witness and therefore setting the underpinning for relationality. Simply put, such practice enables students to recognise the shared humanity in another. Through drawing on the embodied knowledge of students in an ethically safe environment, the possibility exists to create, similarly to the abrupt relationality experienced as a result of a terror attack, a vexing encounter that will constitute new knowledge and bring relationality to the fore. This vexing encounter could result in the recognition of relationality as envisioned by Papastephanou (2018). In this section, we highlighted pedagogical teaching and learning practices that could contribute to the cultivation of an ideal cosmopolitanism—simply put, cosmopolitanism that is inherently moral and transformational.
Implications of Cosmopolitanism for Education Cosmopolitanism, democracy and education share a commonality, and that is the not-yet potential. Although there are criticisms lodged against all three these notions, particularly so as it could be argued that all of these notions are mere utopias that will never be achieved, it is indeed the not- yet that inspires, ignites hope and affects actions. The not-yet, even though it seems unattainable, allows for practical implementation, since the potential for transformation drives change. In the words of Davids and Waghid (2019, p. 102): If there is more to know, then there must be more to do, more to be conscious of and more to be responsible for—which is ultimate what the teaching—learning pilgrimage is meant to awaken in each of us.
Papastephanou (2012, 2018) envisions an eccentric ethico-political cosmopolitanism that is fundamentally ethical and communicative. Such an ideal view of cosmopolitanism, imagined through ethical hope, requires that individuals, thus the citizens of different (mostly) democratic countries across the globe, demonstrate particular attitudes and values—specifically, those attitudes and values, which support the social justice plight of the marginalised. Education has a role to play, through the potential of transformation, and specifically through democratic citizenship education in each country. The possibility to experience to a greater extent cosmopolitanism that is “eccentric” and “ethico-political” diminishes if citizens
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of different countries are not summoned to be socially just responsible citizens in their local environment. Papastephanou (2012, 2018) refers to the challenge experienced by the static self to be provoked into openness for the other. Often, Papastephanou (2012, 2018) continues, such provocation only occurs through a deliberate disruption, for example a terror attack or refugees crossing borders. Only if this initial provocation is followed up with deliberative critical reflection, the possibility arises that the plight of the faceless other—the forgotten other who experiences injustice without own accord, for example the citizen that stayed behind in a war- torn country—can be noticed. Due to the obligatory demand of ethically just cosmopolitanism, democratic citizenship education should be taken seriously. If democratic citizens (students) are able to notice local forms of injustice, through pedagogical practices, such as research that is focused on community- related problems, the possibility exists that the students might traverse to such an extent that, in addition, the voice of the faceless other is also heard. McLean (2015, p. 7) argues that deliberative education is “seen as a promising space for society” as there is the potential of transformation into socially responsible individuals. This is put differently by Walker (2008, p. 158) who states, “[e]ducation involves a becoming.”
Summary An ideal deliberative education, which endeavours to cultivate in citizens the attitudes and values for an ethical cosmopolitan world, needs to respond. An appropriate response, we argue, would be to incorporate teaching and learning pedagogical practices that create the space to notice societal injustice globally through the recognition of the other. Such pedagogical practices could be, for example ubuntu-inspired practices that explore diversity and vulnerability; research focused on lived community- related problems; allowing for the development of critical skills through student participation; the development of care through deliberation; practices that include moral imagination by utilising learning material from the humanities; and lastly, practices that draw on the embodied knowledge of the students. Such deliberative education could cultivate in students the required compassion, care, imagination and responsibility towards the other—for the immediate other and the faceless other—and towards social justice. Through such deliberative education, cosmopolitanism could, to a greater degree, reflect the essence of being eccentric and ethico-political.
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CHAPTER 9
In Becoming Reflexive: Implications for Education
Abstract In this chapter, we draw on the seminal thoughts of David T. Hansen who takes a different look at cosmopolitanism and makes a cogent case for the notion of a reflexive openness to the self and what is known to the self. Put differently, cosmopolitanism as pursuing a reflexive openness to the self implies that one has to be open and reflexive towards that which is known to one—a matter of performing self-introspection and self-criticism. Only then the possibility exists for one to be open and critical to that which is known to one. Hansen further makes the case that cosmopolitanism is also about enhancing a reflexive openness to that which is still in becoming—an idea that undermines any thought that cosmopolitanism can be completely known. Drawing on Hansen’s reflexive idea of cosmopolitanism, we argue why and how higher educational encounters can become self-reflexive and open to that which remains in becoming. We then analyse how pedagogical encounters manifesting with such an open and reflexive cosmopolitanism can guide education differently. Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Reflexive openness • Self • Self-criticism • Becoming • Educational encounters • Pedagogical encounters • Education
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Introduction David T. Hansen (2011) explicates that cosmopolitanism as a concept is portrayed from diverse viewpoints, namely political, economic, moral and cultural. Despite these various viewpoints of cosmopolitanism, Hansen (2011, p. 33) explains that researchers often concur that “a cosmopolitan- minded life would seek to be responsive to the demands of justice toward others [called morality] and of the desire for self-improvement [called ethics].” From this understanding of cosmopolitanism, one can deduce that the self (through ethical self-improvement) and the other (through a morality of justice for all) are undeniably present in a conception of deep cosmopolitanism. Such a view of cosmopolitanism posits that the self and the other are indispensable and reliant on another. Hansen (2011) uses different accounts of cosmopolitanism (political, economic, moral and cultural) to elucidate his particular understanding of another form, namely educational cosmopolitanism. In this chapter, we draw specifically on Hansen’s educational perspective of cosmopolitanism and the related influence on education. Hansen is known specifically for his work, as published in The call to teach (1995), Exploring the moral heart of teaching (2001) and The teacher and the world. A study of cosmopolitanism as education (2011), which all have a strong focus on the identity of the educator and the role of the educator in teaching. In the first section of this chapter, we examine Hansen’s specific views on cosmopolitanism. Following this, we analyse his pronouncements of educational cosmopolitanism. In the third and fourth sections, we discuss the possible implications of educational cosmopolitanism, as viewed by Hansen, on the identity of the educator, and teaching and learning. Having briefly provided a framework for this chapter, the next section addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism as depicted by Hansen.
On Cosmopolitanism Hansen (2011, p. 113) describes the core of cosmopolitanism as a “reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known.” To be cosmopolitan-minded implies that an individual should pursue his or her ability and willingness to reflect. Hansen (2014, p. 9) elucidates the purpose of reflection as an activity when “[p]eople come to see, reciprocally, the limitations in their knowledge and understanding of self, other, and the world.” The understanding is that individuals not only reflect on the
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unknown, but are equally also willing to reflect on that which is known and familiar. To be cosmopolitan-minded requires a willingness of being simultaneously critical and appreciative of all things. It requires one not to abandon that which is held dearly without reflecting on it, or to accept blindly all of the new unknown without evaluating it firstly through the practice of reflexivity. The contention is that an individual who is cosmopolitan-minded is able to remain rooted to his or her identity, whilst he or she is open to being transformed through that which is new (Hansen, 2017). In addition to the practice of reflexivity, one also needs to show a “reflective openness” (Hansen, 2011, p. 60), that is, a particular open- minded outlook on life. The purpose of this particular “openness” is “not just to tolerate others, as significant as that accomplishment is, but to learn from them, which means to permit them to influence one’s life” (Hansen, 2011, p. 60). Openness in such a manner requires a careful decision of being generous, hospitable so to speak, in any encounter between the self and the other (Hansen, 2011). Being open in such a manner involves a conscious decision for growth and self-improvement (thus an ethical promise to the self), which carries the inherent risk of uncertainty about the effect of the unknown on the self. Hansen, Burdick-Shepherd, Cammarano, and Obelleiro (2009, p. 590) describe the open-minded cosmopolitan outlook as one which “not only acknowledges the ubiquity of change and the presence of difference, but it also perceives these conditions promising rather than merely problematic.” To be willing to be open to such an extent, therefore attests to an ethics of self-improvement that is underpinned by cosmopolitanism (Hansen, 2011, p. 33). Also, embedded in cosmopolitanism, is the notion of justice for all of humanity—inclusive of the other—that is called morality (Hansen, 2011, p. 33). Hansen et al. (2009, p. 587) argue in line with the notion of morality that cosmopolitanism could be explained as “an outlook toward the challenges and opportunities of being a person or community dwelling in a world of ongoing social transformation. The concept [cosmopolitanism] helps frame a way of life that is responsive rather than merely reactive to events.” The critical reflection of the unknown (new) and the known (old) necessitates action. This action should result in change—change in the lived reality of the voiceless other. Davids and Waghid (2019a, p. 65) formulate the connection between reflexivity and social justice as follows: “[t]he concern is that human flourishing emanates from continuous reflection upon the self in relation to a world that is continually in flux.”
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Thus far we have introduced the embedded principles—those of ethics and morality—of cosmopolitanism. In addition, we also introduced Hansen’s (2011, p. 113) perspective of cosmopolitanism that requires a “reflective openness” to the unknown, whilst also loyally reflecting on the known. We explained a particular stance of openness, that is, an openness that transcends mere tolerance of those other than the self, and which attests to the embedded principle of ethics (self-improvement). Lastly, we elucidated that being reflexive should lead to responsiveness. Next, we elaborate on the critical and appreciative stance within reflexivity that should lead to action (or responsiveness). Being reflexive, demands a judgement “on the values people hold but [also] on their ways or modes of valuing” (Hansen et al., 2009, p. 589). Hansen et al. (2009, p. 589) continue, “[v]alues and valuing accompany humanity.” Although valuing is interwoven with being human, reflecting on values or the way of valuing is not a simplistic exercise. Hansen et al. (2009) provide three skills that could assist with being reflexive, namely pursuing hope, memory and dialogue, which we discuss briefly as follows: “[h]oping is a turning toward the future within the present” (Hansen et al., 2009, p. 594). Since change is inevitable, through hope that is entrenched in present-day encounters, it becomes imaginable to embrace the promise within the future. Through looking therefore to an illuminated present-day concern and by determining meaning from it for the now and the future, the practice of valuing is exercised. The skill of memory “mirrors the dynamics of remembering and forgetting” (Hansen et al., 2009. p. 595). In this way, the skill of memory echoes the “reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known,” as sometimes the voice of the past should be loud and sometimes more silent to allow space for the voice of the other (Hansen, 2011, p. 113). It is therefore a matter of discernment. Hansen et al. (2009, p. 596) aver, “to be mindful of how one questions and judges the past [thus values it] … is to position oneself to discern and appreciate the ways in which other people question, judge, and value their pasts.” Dialogue is another skill that assists with becoming reflexive. Dialogue requires engagement by the self and the other, irrespective of differences. It is important to note that the aim of dialogue is not to quench any differences, as it is precisely through a recognition of differences that one learns and grows (Hansen et al., 2009). Disruption or deliberativeness assists with transformation and the shaping of individuals.
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The afore-mentioned skills of hope, memory and dialogue could be cultivated through education. Hansen (2014) posits that individuals’ becoming cosmopolitan-minded—in other words, becoming foremost reflexive—could assist with the building of democratic and accountable institutions that could fight inequality and injustice. For that reason, the educational landscape could play a paramount role in shaping the individuals who could assist in building these institutions, and in such a way, education contributes directly to a socially just democratic society. Therefore, in the first instance, cosmopolitanism requires willingness for growth by the self (ethical self-improvement), in order, secondly, for the self to be concerned about the lived reality of the other (morality). In this section, we provided a synopsis of some of Hansen’s thoughts on cosmopolitanism. Particular references were made to being reflexive, the tension between accepting the new whilst holding on to the familiar, to being open-minded, being able to value and make judgements and lastly the way the skills of hope, memory and dialogue could assist with becoming reflexive and able to value. In the next section, we examine Hansen’s view on educational cosmopolitanism.
On Educational Cosmopolitanism Hansen (2011) introduces an important concept when analysing educational cosmopolitanism, by asserting, “cosmopolitan-minded education assists people in moving closer and closer apart and further and further together” (Hansen, 2011, p. 3). These seemingly incongruent aspects, that of closer apart and of further together, are eloquently clarified by Hansen (2011). As the self starts to know the other more intimately, it is possible to recognise more clearly than before why the self and the other are distinctly different from each other. Therefore, even though the self and the other have grown in knowledge and appreciation of one another, they are now decisively aware of the disparities that remain. Similarly, through educational practices, the self and the other share time and space and, as a result, through the “shared experience” the self and the other are indeed moving further together (Hansen, 2011, p. 3). Since values and valuing are intrinsic to being human, education represents particular values. Hansen et al. (2009) categorise educational values into those values that are purposive and those values that are functional. Purposive values are associated with those values that contribute to “developing one’s humanity,” whilst functional values are those associated with
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socialisation, thus leading to “social continuity” (Hansen et al., 2009, p. 591). Through education that has a cosmopolitan orientation through purposive values, students learn that “what is gained are not merely technical skills but an expanding orientation to the world,” which could entice students to action—to participate in their community or on the global stage (Hansen, 2011, p. 117). In order for students and teachers to participate, to be responsive, they should traverse beyond “listening to others to listening with them” (Hansen, 2011, p. 116). The difference between listening to and listening with is the difference between tolerating the other and being willing to be shaped by the other (openness). Hansen (2011, p. 166) avers that listening with others can be described as “an imaginative, aesthetic exercise of trying to see the world as they do, to try to grasp the underlying values, beliefs, and aspirations that inform their ways of looking and knowing.” Listening with others therefore requires, firstly, a particular willingness of the self to be open in the deliberative encounter with the other. Secondly, listening with others requires being able to evaluate the unknown and to determine which new perspectives should be allowed to influence one. This implies that a particular sense of judgement should be cultivated through education. Hansen (2011) posits that one of the aims of education should be to engender in students (and educators) the ability to cast judgement as this will greatly assist individuals to make decisions. Students (and educators) should especially learn that it is possible to stand resolute on some principles, whilst still being open to the other (Hansen, 2011). Thirdly, listening with others also requires communicative skills as through deliberation one will be able to reflect on and judge the unknown and the known. Through dialogue one is able to “move beyond the blind hold of custom” and to learn in which way one should respond to the views and arguments of the other (Hansen, 2011, p. 99). Listening with others in such a manner cultivates humaneness in the self and the other (Hansen, 2011). Such humaneness demonstrates both an ethical and caring response (Noddings, 1997). Humaneness, or differently put, open-mindedness or listening with the other, indicates a recognition of the humanity within the other. “On the one hand, we refuse to force the Other into a model of ourselves; on the other, we recognise a responsibility to the Other—we must respond” (Noddings, 1997, p. 39). This stance of being open, of becoming cosmopolitan-minded, is the response to the call for justice for humanity. In one’s response, one answers the ethical call for justice from one’s own humaneness, and therefore what one brings to the encounter is one’s constructed self. Noddings
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(1997, p. 39) defines the nature of this responsive encounter, between the self and the other, as follows: “[w]e [the self] enter the conversation [encounter or dialogue] full of values, knowledge, beliefs, and projects of our own.” From an educational cosmopolitan perspective, the responsibility is on the educator to be conscious about the nature of an encounter between the self and the other, in order to facilitate the learning process in such a manner that sufficient disruption is introduced without creating an unsafe learning environment. Elsewhere, Hansen (1998, p. 650) argues, “[t]eaching embodies the human endeavour of moving human beings closer to the good, or, posed differently closer to rather than further from the prospect of a flourishing life.” Educational cosmopolitanism therefore is “infused with intellectual and moral promise” as humanness is cultivated in students (Hansen, 1998, p. 650). Such cultivation could lead to students identifying societal concerns and to respond to those concerns in an ethical and just manner. Thus, through educational cosmopolitan, students could be shaped into the future problem-solvers, which act as the ethical and moral agents of societal change (Hansen, 1998). In this section, we have explained how Hansen perceives educational cosmopolitanism. This particular view of Hansen in relation to education necessitates an investigation into the particular calling on the educator that is responsible for the facilitation of learning. In the next section, we will explore the implications of educational cosmopolitanism for the educator.
Implications of Educational Cosmopolitanism for the Educators In this section, we explore the implications of Hansen’s (2011) notion of educational cosmopolitanism for educators. We essentially explore the capacities such a cosmopolitanism demands from educators and the expectations it places on them. Willingness for Growth Educational cosmopolitanism “embodies an attempt to fuse the moral and the ethical—that is to say, to merge the cultivation of self (ethics) in its humane relation with others and the world (the moral)” (Hansen, 2011, p. 90). Foremost, educators need to demonstrate a willingness to partake
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in this process. This willingness will require that an educator adopts a reflexive stance in and towards life as an educator who might often be unaware of the values, beliefs and worldviews he or she inadvertently carries into the classroom. An educator should be open to the “possibility for growth” and being shaped by the teaching process and the deliberative encounters with the students (Hansen & Burbules, 1997, p. 9). Equally so, an educator should understand his or her responsibility as he or she often could contribute to the shaping of students through the educational process and, consequently, being or becoming reflexive is a requisite (Hansen, 1997). Or differently put, “[a]s we [educators] respond [to the other in the student], we inform and are informed, we give and receive, we talk and listen, we shape and are shaped, and we share” (Noddings, 1997, p. 39). Embracing a Reflexive Stance to Prompt Societal Change Following on from above, it is imperative that educators be mindful of this potential of transformation within encounters. As there is a promise of change, of a different future, educators should act responsibly through maximising the potential or promise in each encounter (Hansen, 2011). Such responsible consciousness requires that educators become reflexive as only through the practice of reflexivity—by being critical and appreciative simultaneously—could the unchallenged biasedness, judgements and values within educators be brought to the fore. Principally, an educator is faced with challenges posed to his or her identity as an educator. Being or becoming reflexive, or differently put, the willingness of openness to the new whilst holding on (after critical judgement) to the familiar, “has to do with how one perceives, holds, and expresses one’s identity” (Hansen, 2017, p. 210). Elsewhere, Hansen (2008, p. 294) posits “[a] person [educator] embodies more than a prefigured, preordained, or unchangeable identity.” It is, therefore, envisioned that an educator needs to be able to hold onto his or her identity, by being cautious not to abolish all of the familiar in light of the new that is encountered. Equally, he or she should remain open to the possibility of transformation when required to do so in light of on an ethical call for justice.
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Implementing Particular Exercises in Support of a Reflexive Self As stated earlier, Hansen et al. (2009) purport that the particular skills of hope, memory and dialogue are supportive of the self becoming reflexive. Therefore, educators with a cosmopolitan orientation need to participate in exercises to develop such skills. Hansen (2011, pp. 108–112) lists some useful exercises which he calls “a self-pedagogy,” namely— • identification of meaningful handbooks for guidance on complicated life, human and philosophical aspects; • dedicated relationships with colleagues to contemplate, imagine and practice vigorous impromptu argumentation; • philosophy with colleagues about certain subject matters and to cultivate deeper insight into these matters; • practice to be silent instead of a spontaneous reaction to spoken words and ideas; and • meditating about educational encounters—with a specific focus on the other. Hansen (2011) avers that, if an educator deliberately incorporates the afore-mentioned activities, he or she increases the likelihood of the self becoming reflexive. In this way, the educator is “coming further and further into the role, and further and further into the world” (Hansen, 2011, p. 112). Exercising Relational Care on the Basis of Equality A desire by an educator for self-growth and possible transformation— through creating deliberative encounters in the classroom that draw on the participation of students—could imply, in Rancièrian terms, that an educator endorses equal intelligence of a student and the educator him- or herself (Rancière, 1991). As such, a particular humility unfolds. If an educator shows that he or she is open to learning from the student, equally so, a student is open to learn from an educator, it opens up the possibility of student engagement. Through the participation of students in the teaching and learning process, the promise of a student being able to learn on his or her own (thus becoming emancipated), becomes a reality. This action on the part of an educator, of giving expression to equal intelligence, is a vindication of the act of relational care. Delanty (2012) states
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particularly that cosmopolitanism demands awareness by the self of the various embedded relationships within the educational context. By being aware of the various relationships and demonstrating care, an educator is able to show students’ lived values and principles. Waghid (2019, p. 15) explains it as follows: “modelling is a pedagogic act of teaching that can invite students (the cared-for) to bring into question what their carers (university teachers) have to say, and then to articulate more informed and alternative understanding.” Care in this manner, we argue, becomes only a possibility if the educator’s self is emancipated sufficiently, so that he or she can demonstrate humility through creating equal conditions for students’ empowerment. Moreover, an educator with a cosmopolitan orientation needs to live these associated values practically in society. Social cohesion, the eradication of inequality and injustice, all address the call for morality. Waghid (2019) argues that educators (and students) should not be satisfied merely to talk about change, but should implement change (whether inside or outside of the classroom). Educational cosmopolitanism is, therefore, a call to action, to responsiveness. Simply put, educational cosmopolitanism is about the implementation of practices that affirm the human dignity of others. Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, and Hepp (2009) refer to a responsiveness to injustice as prescriptive morality. Prescriptive morality, they argue, “is activation-based, sensitive to positive outcomes, and focused on what we should do” (Janoff-Bulman et al., 2009, p. 533). The world needs individuals (educators) willing to be the required change through practical action. And through education (and reflexive educators), students could be shaped and formed into the future agents of change. Greene (2001, p. 47) argues accordingly: [W]e [educators] can somehow trust that, if we have taught them [students] how to search and let them catch some glean of the untraveled, they will find their own ways, as we have done, and begin teaching themselves, pursuing their own possibilities.
Educational cosmopolitanism calls on educators to become reflexive, but reflexive for a purpose. That purpose is to contribute to societal transformation through a pursuit for meaning. This pursuit of meaning leads directly into the next section. Thus far, we have argued that an educator’s identity (the self) contributes to the shaping and forming of students. However, from an educational cosmopolitanist orientation, two other
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aspects also contribute towards the transformation process within teaching. Firstly, there is knowledge (as contained in the curriculum). Hansen (2011, p. 91) claims: [Educational cosmopolitanism] invites the teacher to draw out from the curriculum the way in which subject matter expresses the human quest for meaning […] The notion of a quest reflects the idea of a curriculum as a living response to experience: as an expression of attempts to make sense, to understand, to appreciate, to become at home.
Secondly, the teaching and learning practices utilised (the way or manner of teaching) by the educator are instrumental. Chubbuck and Zembylas (2008, p. 311) posit, “[t]eaching for social justice, then, is not only a cognitive endeavour; it involves engaging in emotional reflection, finding one’s own contextualised relationship to justice, and creating an empowered sense of agency to take action and transform one’s teaching practices.” In the next section, we explore the impact of educational cosmopolitanism on teaching and learning and the curriculum.
Teaching and Learning in Relation to Educational Cosmopolitanism Earlier, we posited that educational cosmopolitanism, as perceived by Hansen (2011), requires a particular stance of being or becoming reflexive. In being or becoming reflexive, educators need to identify the role of values within educational contexts (Hansen et al., 2009). An educator has the responsibility to lead students, through pedagogical practices, towards becoming reflexive. Hansen et al. (2009) purport that it is a responsibility of an educator to shape and form students. Hansen et al. (2009, p. 601) claim: [An educator’s] task is to make it possible for students to perceive their ways of valuing, the ways they hold values. This process would include becoming aware of the immediacy of valuing—that all persons just do value, just as they all breathe—but that it is also possible to create reflective distance from the immediate aspects of valuing and learn to discern, to appreciate, and to judge. Put another way, people can learn to reach rather than merely pass judgement.
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Hansen and James (2016) contend that one of the few freedoms that still exist in the educational landscape is that the pedagogical practices used (in relation to teaching and learning) are the prerogative of an educator. This freedom, however, comes with a great responsibility. Since the identity (values, beliefs and worldview) of an educator will significantly inform his or her choice of content and of facilitation mode, Hansen (2011, p. 4) explains this responsibility on educators as follows: “[t]hus much more is at issue in educating than the transfer of knowledge, important as that is. The ways in which teaching and learning happen (or fail to) embody moral dimension, for better or for worse.” Some of the teaching and learning practices that could be incorporated by educators are those that incorporate the aesthetic, such as poems, music or art. Through unlocking the imaginative ability within students, they are able to be transformed. Through the aesthetic, “students still live in their local world, but they are no longer merely of it” (Hansen, 2011, p. 105). This is the potential of incorporating material from the humanities and the arts in pedagogical practices. The use of such material creates an opportunity for dialogue, and since dialogue is intrinsic to educational cosmopolitanism, we shall expound on this specific pedagogical practice. There is a risk involved in opening the self up to the other through dialogue and individuals who sometimes remain passive, rather than engaged (Wahlström, 2016). Often the challenge in the facilitation of dialogue is the non-engagement of participants, for instance, participants who just want to express their views, without listening and being open to reflect on their own beliefs and opinions. Remaining passive in dialogue, is diminishing the potential of change. Dialogue consists of different practices, namely that of speaking through the articulation of one’s thoughts; listening to the views and perceptions of others and reflecting on one’s position, and to speak again and proffer one’s infused (through listening and reflection) thoughts (Davids & Waghid, 2019b). For Wahlström (2016), dialogue in a cosmopolitan sense implies that one is open and willing to reflect. Being open and reflexive in such a way, Wahlström (2016) argues, result in meaning and novel ways of viewing and living life. It is through listening with others (Hansen, 2011), through engaging, through the recognition of the worth of the other, that the promise of transformation becomes possible. In line with the African notion of ubuntu, the self needs the other in order to cultivate his or her humanity. Mahlomaholo (2014, p. 681) avers,
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[A]n important aspect of learning and of democratisation [and of cosmopolitanism]; however, … [is that] it cannot be achieved from one person’s perspective or actions alone. It requires a group, that is, two or more people, to present alternative theories and conceptualisation, serving as sounding boards with which to critique and validate a person’s way of seeing and being in the world.
This listening with others, sometimes requires that the self delays judgement (Waghid, 2019). This delay of judgement, Waghid (2019) argues, demonstrates care, as sometimes students will disengage if they are judge prematurely. Defensible deliberative dialogue and the consequential participation by students are often reliant on the teaching material and content. Elsewhere, Hansen (2011, p. 98) elucidates the responsibility of an educator in relation to the knowledge choice (curriculum content) by averring that a “cosmopolitan dispensation would encourage as much diversity in curricular selection as possible, so long as the engagement is in-depth and systematic.” Wahlström (2016, p. 45) rightly argues that one of the conditions for cosmopolitan dialogue is that the curriculum content is viewed as a “shared environment” and as such, curriculum content could be viewed as a catalyst for moral impetus. A diverse curriculum has the potential to encourage students into participation, which in turn creates the space for deliberation through dialogue. In an African context, the diverse curriculum could be couched as the decoloniality of the curriculum. Simply put, local and international content should be included in the curriculum (Mbembe, 2015). Zipin, Fataar, and Brennan (2015) state that decoloniality of the curriculum could result in societal change. This is so, as “decoloniality is primarily concerned with the cultivation of just and equal human relationships” (Waghid, 2019, p. 95). Human relationships within the educational space could be engendered through deliberation, but perhaps only if the curriculum content draws students into participation. Manthalu and Waghid (2019, p. 30) posit the following: Ideal decolonisation is cognisant of the indispensable value of the inadequacy of any cultural perspective to resolve the modern challenges of the human condition single-handedly. Ideal [de]coloniality therefore allows for hybridity where a people respectfully and volitionally appropriate elements of other people.
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The self needs the other and equally also, the other needs the self. Curriculum content that is sufficiently diverse would draw participants into openness through deliberation. In this way, through defensible deliberative dialogue (prompted through relatable knowledge content) as pedagogical practice, the self and the other have the potential to become reflectively open.
Summary In this chapter, we engaged with David T. Hansen’s view of educational cosmopolitanism and its implications for university education. Two aspects were highlighted: firstly, that cosmopolitanism is associated with an ethical call for growth of the self and simultaneously a call for justice in the world (morality) (Hansen, 2011); and, secondly, educational cosmopolitanism intrinsically calls the self into being reflexive (Hansen, 2011). This particular stance of being reflexive requires that an educator have a particular openness to the unknown (other), whilst, through critical reflexivity, remain open and reflexive about that which is known. Being or becoming reflexive is tantamount to transforming the self and cultivating social cohesion in a just world, if responsible human relationships were to manifest in an open way. In line with Rancièrian thought and the African notion of ubuntu, Waghid (2018, p. 7) purports: [E]ducation seems to be connected to two acts: being in association with others, and engaging and justifying one’s understandings in their presence. And, the act of engaging with people and co-belonging with them in an atmosphere of deliberative action is to become situated in others’ presence through education.
We argued that such a perception of educational cosmopolitanism calls for a responsiveness on the part of educators. Such a responsiveness is two- fold: firstly, the response addresses matters pertaining to the identity of the educator, which includes a willingness of educators to self-improve, becoming reflexive to the benefit of the world, implement actions that can enrich reflexive selves, and demonstrate care in the classroom and implement practical societal change. Secondly, such a response addresses matters pertaining to the teaching and learning initiated by educators. It was identified that dialogue and deliberation are integral to becoming reflexive. That is, dialogue that is defensible when students become active
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articipants, are willing to articulate thoughts, and are willing to listen to p one another. Often, participation is dependent on a curriculum content that is diverse enough and inclusive of local and global content. Educational cosmopolitanism calls upon teachers and students to open up themselves to one another in order to be willingly shaped by the other in the mere hope of forming the other to instigate societal change.
References Chubbuck, S., & Zembylas, M. (2008). The emotional ambivalence of socially just teaching: A case study of a novice urban schoolteacher. American Educational Research Journal, 45(2), 274–318. Davids, N., & Waghid, Y. (2019a). Teaching and learning as a pedagogic pilgrimage: Cultivating faith, hope and imagination. London: Routledge. Davids, N., & Waghid, Y. (2019b). Universities, pedagogical encounters, openness and free speech: Reconfiguring democratic education. London: Lexington Books. Delanty, G. (2012). The idea of critical cosmopolitanism. In G. Delanty (Ed.), Routledge handbook of cosmopolitanism studies (pp. 38–46). London: Routledge. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hansen, D. T. (1995). The call to teach. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hansen, D. T. (1997). Being a good influence. In N. C. Burbules & D. T. Hansen (Eds.), Teaching and its predicaments (pp. 163–174). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hansen, D. T. (1998). The moral is in the practice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(6), 643–655. Hansen, D. T. (2001). Exploring the moral heart of teaching: Toward a teacher’s creed. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hansen, D. T. (2008). Curriculum and the idea of a cosmopolitan inheritance. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 40(3), 289–312. Hansen, D. T. (2011). The teacher and the world: A study of cosmopolitanism as education. London: Routledge. Hansen, D. T. (2014). Cosmopolitanism as cultural creativity: New modes of educational practice in globalizing times. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 1–14. Hansen, D. T. (2017). Cosmopolitanism as education: A philosophy for educators in our time. Religious Education, 112(3), 207–216. Hansen, D. T., & Burbules, N. C. (1997). Introduction. In N. C. Burbules & D. T. Hansen (Eds.), Teaching and its predicaments (pp. 1–10). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Hansen, D. T., Burdick-Shepherd, S., Cammarano, C., & Obelleiro, G. (2009). Education, values, and valuing in cosmopolitanism. Curriculum Inquiry, 39(5), 587–612. Hansen, D. T., & James, C. (2016). The importance of cultivating democratic habits in schools: Enduring lessons from Democracy and education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(1), 94–112. Janoff-Bulman, R., Sheikh, S., & Hepp, S. (2009). Proscriptive versus prescriptive morality: Two faces of moral regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 521–537. Mahlomaholo, S. M. G. (2014). Higher education and democracy: Analysing communicative action in the creation of sustainable learning environments. South African Journal of Higher Education, 28(3), 678–696. Manthalu, C. H., & Waghid, Y. (2019). Decoloniality as a viable response to educational transformation in Africa. In C. H. Manthalu & Y. Waghid (Eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonisation in Africa (pp. 25–46). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mbembe, A. (2015). Decolonising knowledge and the question of the archive. Retrieved May 11, 2019, from https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/ Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20 Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf. Noddings, N. (1997). Must we motivate? In N. C. Burbules & D. T. Hansen (Eds.), Teaching and its predicaments (pp. 29–44). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Waghid, Y. (2018). On the relevance of a theory of democratic citizenship education for Africa. In Y. Waghid & N. Davids (Eds.), African democratic citizenship education revisited (pp. 1–12). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Waghid, Y. (2019). Towards a philosophy of caring in higher education: Pedagogy and nuances of care. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wahlström, N. (2016). Cosmopolitanism as communication? On conditions for educational conversations in a globalized society. Scandinavian Journal of Education, 60(1), 32–47. Zipin, L., Fataar, A., & Brennan, M. (2015). Can social realism do social justice? Debating the warrants for curriculum knowledge selection. Education as Change, 19(2), 9–36.
CHAPTER 10
Developing a Cosmopolitanist-deliberative Framework for MOOCs in South African (Higher) Education
Abstract In this chapter, we argue that the need for a massive open online course (MOOC) (our case study of cosmopolitan education) that aims to enhance African and Western knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural boundaries, on the one hand, while addressing societal inequities of student access to higher education in Africa, on the other, is vital in the quest for addressing instances of cognitive and social injustice in southern contexts. With further research required into southern learner-educator experiences, MOOCs premised on what we argue for in this chapter, namely defence of a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework could create learning opportunities for students in such contexts in harnessing the educational potential of the Internet. Such an understanding of MOOCs holds for students the possibility of transforming the societal inequities of student access to higher education of the southern contexts through knowledge acquisition, sharing and co-construction towards developing agency in such students. Keywords MOOC • Cosmopolitan education • African • Societal inequities • Student access • Higher education in Africa • Social injustice • Learner-educator experiences • Cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework • Learning • Co-construction • Students
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Introduction For over a decade, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been predominantly designed and hosted in Global North regions (King, Pegrum, & Forsey, 2018). Much of the existing research around MOOCs reproduces top-down development thinking in the Global North (King et al., 2018). In stark contrast to the Global North, MOOCs in Africa and the global South (excluding Australia and New Zealand) are relatively in their infancy stage. For South Africa, as a developing nation, the establishment of the first set of MOOCs came into fruition just under five years ago at the University of Cape Town. South Africa’s initiation into the global context of MOOCs is undoubtedly a welcoming addition in placing Africa on the map of technological evolution and innovation in higher education within the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. MOOCs in South Africa have already begun to disrupt the status quo in the functioning of universities. For one, MOOCs—particularly in South Africa where access to tertiary education is limited as a result of the number (26 in 2015) universities in South Africa available to attend to the rising demand for such education—address the challenge of physical proximity for many historically disadvantaged students (Xing & Marwala, 2017). Second, MOOCs function as a way of addressing limited productivity where the maximum number of students is compressed into lecture theatres and where examination-marking capacities are limited (Xing & Marwala, 2017). Given the transition towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution in South Africa, through MOOCs, universities are emerging as interdisciplinary institutions focusing on augmenting innovative teaching and learning practices through virtual classrooms, laboratories, libraries and educators (Xing & Marwala, 2017). Placing Africa in the context of MOOCs is one step in the process of beginning to contest the dominant mode of thinking around MOOCs under the Global North canon. Africa’s first set of MOOCs in the global context by implication contributes to the call for a critical (re)examining of Global North dominant modes of learning, particularly with the need for university educators and students’ voices from Southern contexts to be more prevalent and heard in the global environment. Questions on online courses aimed at enhancing the cultural differences in Northern regions that places Southern—and more specifically African contexts—alongside Northern contexts are essential if educational institutions were to begin to decolonise the functioning of MOOCs. However, the lack of an explicit
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pedagogical framework to guide university educators, particularly in South Africa, towards developing a cosmopolitanist curriculum faces specific challenges. For one, a MOOC pedagogy and content irrelevant to an African context is most certainly to be contested by university students, who through the recent #FeesMustFall movement initiated in 2015 in South Africa, argue for the relevance of the Western canon to the African experience. Second, South African learners, particularly in historically disadvantaged schools and communities, are not exposed to the dynamic nature of MOOC functionality and therefore, may encounter pedagogical challenges when transitioning to higher education institutions. Considering that school learners would not be exposed to the full functionality of MOOCs, instructivist ways of teaching which share congruences with the commonly referred extended MOOCs or xMOOCs in contrast to connectivist MOOCs or cMOOCs are certainly not uncommon to school contexts. Many schools—at least from our own experiences of countless lesson observations during practice teaching stints over a period of two decades and engagements with teachers in historically disadvantaged communities in the Western Cape in South Africa—continue to function as instructivist institutions. To some extent, the level of instructivism attributes to a rigid South African Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) that seems to advance Freire’s (2006) banking concept according to which learners are expected to regurgitate content through some form of assessment with critical thinking being curtailed although not entirely dismissed. Experiential forms of teaching and learning, such as problem-based learning and project-based learning, which share attributes of a connectivist notion of a MOOC are certainly a needed addition to disrupting rote and traditional forms of teaching so routinely practised in South African schools. However, such forms of teaching, like MOOCs, towards enacting a learner-centred pedagogy, particularly in the South African context are met with opposition in schools where there is a culture of resistance to critical innovation (Liyanagunawardena & Williams, 2015). This level of resistance may ensue since learners and their teachers may not trust new and unfamiliar online learning platforms (Garrido et al., 2016) and who may be caution away from engaging in discussion forums (Kizilcec, Saltarelli, Reich, & Cohen, 2017; Onah, Sinclair, Boyatt, & Foss, 2014). The resistance to new forms of pedagogies displayed by learners who go on to enter the higher education stream in South Africa further places strain on academics—more specifically, academics having to orientate such
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newly entered university students into blended forms of learning. The latter forms of learning are undoubtedly needed if South Africa indeed is to transition and function in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The implication of resistance by university students to adapt to changing pedagogies as a result of their schooling background thus places considerable pressure on university educators, particularly in the South African context to conform to traditional modes of teaching. The challenge for university educators in such instances is then how best to transition students into university teaching, where blended forms of learning are prevalent. Also, the resistance portrayed by students—particularly in the field of teacher education—who go on to teach in schools, survives the teacher training and ends up perpetuating the very challenge that university educators encounter when school learners start university. Critical teacher education is thus essential, as these teachers will be the driving force of a pedagogical framework necessary for preparing school learners for the university context and one in which MOOCs are starting to become prevalent in South African higher education institutions. It is against this backdrop that we aim to respond to the following questions in this chapter: first, how do we prepare students or learners from historically disadvantaged communities for a changing environment, one in which MOOCs may be necessary particularly with the drive towards Fourth Industrial Revolution teaching and learning; and second, how can we begin to establish MOOCs that focus on the lived experiences of Africans, more specifically one that places African students and learners at the fulcrum of their learning? The need for a MOOC that potentially aims to enhance African and Western knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural boundaries, on the one hand, while addressing societal inequities of student access to higher education in Africa, on the other, is vital in the quest for addressing instances of cognitive and social injustice in Southern contexts. With further research required into Southern learner and educator experiences, MOOCs premised on what we argue for in this chapter, namely defence of a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework, could create learning opportunities for students in such contexts in harnessing the educational potential of the Internet (King et al., 2018). Such an understanding of MOOCs holds for students the possibility of transforming them into unfamiliar contexts through knowledge sharing, acquisition and co-construction through networking towards developing agency in such students.
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By implication, in this chapter, we contend that a cosmopolitanist- deliberative approach can offer the implementation of MOOCs some ways as to why and how difference, dissent and otherness can be cultivated among South African students and learners. In this chapter, we revisit Iris Marion Young’s (2000) notion of deliberative democracy and show its interconnectedness within Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2006) account of cosmopolitanism. What follows is an exposition of MOOCs in terms of a cosmopolitanist-deliberative approach that lends itself to engendering cosmopolitan education in South African universities and schools. We show that instructivist and connectivist notions of MOOCs can most poignantly be enhanced through a cosmopolitanist-deliberative democratic understanding of education. We argue why and how such a form of democratic education can be considered a desirable outcome of pedagogical practices through online teaching and learning in both secondary and higher education in South Africa.
Instructivist and Connectivist Underpinnings of MOOCs The instructivist perception of learning is very much aligned to Freire’s (2006) argument against banking education. For the instructivist, learning is a means of plotting the external or real world on to the attitudes, behaviours and opinions of students (Porcaro, 2011). According to such a view of learning, power seems to be external to the student, usually residing with the knowledge expert, and must, therefore, be transferred to the student by the knowledge expert (Waghid & Waghid, 2016). With xMOOCs, the course presenter functions as a curator of knowledge, delivering course content asynchronously to students. A deconstruction of the pedagogical practices of xMOOCs, which draws primarily on instructivism, may not be sufficient to foster the creation of inclusive democratised spaces in the university classroom. Such undemocratic spaces, which are established as a result of the unequal relationships of power afforded to the knowledge expert unquestionably silence the student to the extent that the student becomes voiceless (Waghid & Waghid, 2018). The limitations of xMOOCs further counteract the call for universities in South Africa under the guidance of the #FeesMustFall movement to break free from pedagogies that fail to place university students at the centre of their learning. Students’ level of frustration occurs as a result of them
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feeling excluded from pedagogical practices, and is undoubtedly relevant for the need to decolonise the functioning of MOOCs in South Africa (Waghid, 2019). Any attempt to shift away from learning design practices, drawing primarily on instructivism in South Africa, is undoubtedly warranted, mainly if students were to serve as co-constructors of knowledge with their educators and not as mere recipients of the information. In terms of connectivism, George Siemens (2005) proposes that such a learning theory centres on the residing connections among people and digital artefacts within ubiquitous networks. This learning theory explains how the Internet creates opportunities to learn and share information across the web. Internet-based technologies that can facilitate the flow of information include email, online discussion forums, Wikis, social networking sites and other technology platforms such as MOOCs. Under connectivism, the role of a course presenter on a MOOC aims at supporting students in their learning. By implication, agency therefore derives from individuals who establish a personal network. Siemens (2005) further delineates that the strengthening of knowledge, learning and understanding by implication occurs through the extension of a personal network. Siemens’s (2005) elucidation of connectivism is premised on eight basic principles that contribute to the role of networks in advancing mutual understanding and learning among students. Siemens (2005) suggests the following eight basic principles of a connectivist learning theory: • learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions; • learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources; • learning may reside in nonhuman appliances; • capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known; • nurturing and maintaining connections facilitate continual learning; • ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill; • currency, or keeping up with knowledge, is the goal of connectivist learning activities; and • decision-making is a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of new information are seen through the lens of a shifting context. Answers are tentative in that what is correct one day may be incorrect the next, given the potential for information and conditions to change.
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Connectivism, along Siemens’s (2005) eight principles, informs the learning design of a MOOC necessary in promoting student autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity or connectiveness. The implications of these eight principles further link to the spaces that cMOOCs offer students—more specifically, the spaces necessary for students to think more openly than in rigid and confined spaces, the willingness to learn cooperatively with others, and the internalisation of heightened critical analytical capacities (Bouchard, 2009). In light of the shortcomings of instructivism, in stark contrast to the perceived benefits of connectivism we explore, the design of MOOCs certainly does not lend credence to the exclusive selection of these contrasting theories. We consider such an unbiased identification of a MOOC about a selected theory unnatural to the real context in the designing of MOOCs. In reality, the ideals are that instructivist and connectivist learning theories co-exist in the design of a MOOC. A MOOC cannot be considered exclusively instructivist without drawing a clear line in terms of defining the goals and aims of the MOOC. A MOOC leaning towards an instructivist paradigm could also have elements of connectivism, in the same way in which cMOOCs could also contain content that situates the instructor as the knowledge expert. The essence of power is what is needed to be examined for MOOCs to articulate a co-existence of instructivism and connectivism and one which encourages agency among students. We are therefore not arguing for instructivism as the selected learning theory above connectivism or vice versa, but rather we explicate the transition needed for school learners to adapt their learning through their educators towards a greater understanding of MOOCs. The latter may contribute to the realisation of a cosmopolitanist curriculum. This brings us to the framework that we argue for, which is necessary in preparing school- leavers for the university context in South Africa required for effective online teaching and learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Towards a Cosmopolitan-deliberative Democratic Notion of Education In response to the underlying question: how do we prepare learners or students from historically disadvantaged communities for a changing university environment, we are quite attracted to Appiah’s (2006) notion of cosmopolitanism. For Appiah (2006), cosmopolitanism comprises two
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strands. Firstly, according to Appiah (2006), one strand pertains to the general moral idea in which, as an individual, one expresses an obligation to others. This level of obligation extends, as Appiah (2006) submits, beyond one’s relationship with family and friends, or even the more formal relationship through the idea of shared citizenship. Secondly, another strand relates to the notion that one takes the value of particular human lives genuinely and not solely the value of human life (Appiah, 2006). What Appiah (2006) alludes to in both strands of cosmopolitanism is that one takes a significant interest in the practices and beliefs of others beyond one’s culture and identity that lend them significance. When one takes significant interest in particular human lives, then one explores more profoundly the significance of others, and cosmopolitanism recognises such differences. It is such an understanding of difference through the two intertwined strands of cosmopolitanism that we advocate in our connection with Young’s (2000) deliberative approach of democratic education. Young’s (2000) notion of deliberative democratic education entails several normative ideals for the relationships and dispositions of deliberating parties, such as inclusion, equality, reasonableness and publicity. Inclusion as the first stated ideal by Young (2000) embodies mutual respect. Through mutual respect, individuals are afforded spaces to engage with others through freedom of expression, interest, opinions and perspectives relevant to the issues for which public solutions are expected (Young, 2000). Hence, through inclusion, individuals are considered by Young (2000) legitimately included in democratic decision-making if they participate in the actual process. Biesta (2009) makes a further valid argument for inclusion, arguing for otherness and difference. For Biesta (2009), working towards total democratic inclusion by implication results in individuals becoming even more attentive to otherness and difference. If university students and school learners were to be assimilated and acculturated into the ideas and ideologies of their (higher education) educators, then such students and learners respectively risk losing their voices. One could further advance such relationships as sustainable and mutually beneficial for lifelong learning. Displaying openness to unassimilated others instead, as Young (2000) so poignantly claims, involves affirming a relationship with them at the same time as one affirms a respectful distance between them. Mutual respect for others is, therefore, not enacted when one displays affective expression towards others while maintaining one’s ideologies and thoughts to the extent that one expects of others to conform obligingly to one’s
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ideas. Such a passive assimilationist approach to convincing others of their perhaps uninformed points of view inculcates an environment in which one shows disrespect to the other. Instead, mutual respect towards others links to recognise the differences in others’ opinions to allow for them to recognise the differences in their own opinions. Such a stance towards democratic iterations is instead recognition or acknowledgement of the other, which Young (2000) describes as neither tolerance nor as communal identification. In this regard, when one listens to others’ opinions and views without assimilating their opinions, one, in turn, establishes a relationship with the other, albeit at a distance through mutual respect. Such an understanding of inclusion is what we infer, linked to Appiah’s (2006) elucidation of cosmopolitanism, as having an obligation to others outside of one’s culture. Educators in both secondary and higher education contexts, therefore, have an obligation towards cultivating mutual respect in deliberative engagements with student and learners. Educators also have an obligation to be consciously aware of their actions to prevent assimilation and acculturation of the points of view of their students or learners in consonance with their own. This notion is what Appiah (2006) refers to when he claims that the level of obligation extends beyond one’s relationship with family, friends or even more formal relationships through shared citizenship. This notion of mutual respect is further advanced when (higher education) educators take into account the real value of particular lives. Such an understanding of cosmopolitanism which is commensurate with Young’s (2000) notion of inclusion, by implication means that mutual respect best manifests when (higher education) educators value the “otherness” in their students or learners. Young’s (2000) second ideal is concerned with political equality, which values all individuals on equal terms. Young’s (2000) ideal is premised on the notion of free and uncensored speech. In other words, each person should have an equal right and opportunity to articulate his or her matters of interest and apprehension; to question one another; to respond to and criticise one another’s points of disagreement without any forms of coercion or domination to threaten others into accepting one’s proposition or claim (Young, 2000, p. 23). Freedom from domination and coercion by implication means that one can liberate oneself from such oppressive circumstances. Freire (2006) argues that such a humanistic and historical task of the oppressed by implication obliges the oppressors to conform to such forms of freedom.
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For Freire (2003), the task of freedom infers that the oppressed are, in essence, tasked to free the oppressors of their dominant ways of knowing and being. We argue that this task renders the oppressed with a constitutional obligation to free one another from forms of oppression. More specifically, the situation is in principle one where the oppressed is being oppressed by the oppressor, with the oppressors being oppressed by their consciousness towards abusive power. Freire (2003, p. 44) poignantly states that the oppressors who oppress and exploit by power cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Power as a catalyst for change, therefore, depends on an obligation of the oppressed to enact transformative change. However, such forms of power only become apparent when, as Biesta (2017) postulates, one exposes the oppressive workings of power. Biesta (2017) argues for a demystification of power, because only when one becomes aware of how power works and how it works upon one as an individual does one begin to liberate oneself and others from such forms of oppression. If we were to identify the situation of students or learners to be like that of the oppressed, then it makes sense for such students or learners—through an obligatory stance at least from a cosmopolitan point of view—to uncover the unequal power relations that may be rendered by their (higher education) educators in classroom contexts. Biesta (2017) further claims that a modern logical form of emancipation starts from a distrust in the experiences of the one to experience emancipation. In other words, for Biesta (2017), emancipation requires an objective stance of the oppressors—another form of obligation—to explicate unequal power relations exerted by their oppressors. The problem arises when (higher education) educators are reluctant to share positions of power with their students and learners. If it is in a (higher education) educator’s culture to resist change and to treat students and learners as if they are mere recipients of information then, by implication, such an approach to teaching undermines the very cosmopolitan notion of valuing the particular human experiences of students and learners. Appiah’s (2006) second strand, therefore, expects of (higher education) educators to display some form of humanity towards students as equal beings and not as passive objects in learning. Valuing other lives, therefore, at least from a cosmopolitan point of view, requires of (higher education) educators to move beyond their position of power towards emancipatory forms of teaching and learning. In other words, this refers to a form of freedom where students and learners are obliged to
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expose their (higher education) educators to their dominant ways of doing and being and one where (higher education) educators take an active stance towards creating spaces for students and learners to experience one another as equals. Young’s (2000) third ideal on reasonableness foregrounded within the Habermasian (1984) notion of rational expression explores the set of dispositions of those individuals who are willing to listen and engage with others on, for instance, why their claims or proposals are not deemed apposite or correct in public debates and discussions. For Young (2000), reasonableness is a necessary ideal for reaching decisions and in registering dissent in instances of disagreement. An individual, through the ideal of reasonableness, therefore, aims through an open mind to make decisions not blinded by prior norms, beliefs or self-interests, but rather, through rational thinking and the willingness to accept revisions to one’s proposals or claims (Young, 2000). Habermas (1984) terms such virtue as criticisability, in which through rational expressions, one explicates willingness towards correcting one’s claims or proposals through identifying one’s inaccuracies. Habermas’s (1984) claim for argumentation as the medium of a rational expression is further vindicated when those who act from a moral standpoint do so with reason. In other words, those who argue ought to do so judiciously. For Habermas (1984), in cases of normative conflict, those who argue do not give in to their effects nor pursue their interests but are concerned to judge disputes from a moral and consensual standpoint. Indeed, such a medium of rational expressions, we argue, is necessary for inculcating cosmopolitan democratic education. Argumentation premised on the quest for a moral standpoint seems to be commensurate with Appiah’s (2006) first strand of cosmopolitanism where students and learners and (higher education) educators are obligated to correct their mistakes. Such a form of obligation to others by implication infers that students and learners and (higher education) educators ought to be more forthcoming to correct their mistakes for the benefit of enhancing morally accountable discourses. The obligation of learners, students and their (higher education) educators towards a morally accountable discourse is further vindicated when they show a genuine concern for others in valuing their beliefs and interests as significant. Young’s (2000) fourth and last ideal entails that the interaction among individuals in a democratic decision-making process forms a public premised on the notion of accountability. For Young (2000), the ideal of
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publicity functions in a manner in which individuals hold others accountable and are in turn held accountable for their actions. Such an understanding of accountability, we infer, further links to the MacIntyrian (1999) virtue of truthfulness. MacIntyre (1999, p. 150) argues that, for an individual to engage in dialogue with others, requires the individual to understand the other’s point of view. Hence, the concerns of the other to which one responds in dialogue, explicate the actions of genuine concern. A moral and genuine concern for the other is what MacIntyre (1999) claims as necessary for accountability and is, in essence, enacted when the individual is capable of questioning, asserting and prescribing in light of the other’s conception a collective common good. In this sense, through acts of accountability of one’s actions premised on the virtue of truthfulness (Waghid, Waghid, & Waghid, 2018), individuals will have learned not only how to speak to others, but also how to speak for others (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 150). Such acts of representing the voiceless depict the moral consciousness of one to act in a manner befitting the beliefs, values and ideologies of the public (Waghid et al., 2018). The individual is, therefore, conscientious of his or her thoughts and actions to the benefit of the public. Young (2000) further claims that, through accountability, individuals within the public sphere have access to one’s point of view, which further raises the level of carefulness when expressing oneself in such public domains. In other words, for Young (2000), when one speaks in a public domain, one does so critically and self-reflexively with the idea that some third-party groups might be listening. For Young (2000), such an idea of consciousness by implication means that one should always expect to encounter challenges through disagreement with one’s claims or proposals. Within Appiah’s (2006) first strand of cosmopolitanism, one’s obligation to others depicts the level of accountability one enacts in deliberative encounters. We therefore argue that Appiah’s (2006) first strand of cosmopolitanism—at least within a MacIntyrian (1999) sense implies that obligation depends on truthfulness as a virtue of accountability. Such an understanding of accountability is commensurate with Appiah’s (2006) second strand of cosmopolitanism. By implication, it means that students or learners and (higher education) educators should always be accountable for their actions through self-reflexivity; expressing a moral consciousness acting as a representative of the voiceless; and being concerned with enacting transformative change through deliberative encounters for the betterment of the public or community.
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In sum, a cosmopolitanist-deliberative democratic understanding of education is cultivated according to an Appiahnian (2006) notion of cosmopolitanism commensurate with Young’s (2000) four ideals of a deliberative democratic theory of education in the following ways. First, the approach premised on the notion that (higher education) educators have an obligation towards cultivating mutual respect in deliberative engagements with their students and learners. Second, (higher education) educators are expected to take an active stance towards creating spaces for students and learners to experience teaching and learning as equals. This principle further obliges students and learners to expose to their (higher education) educators to their dominant ways of doing and being. Third, (higher education) educators have an obligation towards a morally accountable discourse by expressing a genuine concern for “others.” Last, (higher education) educators have an obligation to their students and learners in their deliberative encounters based on truthfulness as a virtue of accountability. In light of the above mentioned, we contend that a cosmopolitanist- deliberative democratic approach can offer the implementation of MOOCs some ways as to why and how difference, dissent and otherness could be cultivated among South African students and learners through their (higher education) educators. We now examine the case of teaching for change as a MOOC through the framework that we consider necessary for developing a curriculum that is relevant to both secondary and higher education contexts in South Africa.
Reflections on a MOOC at a South African University In response to the underlying question: how we can begin to establish MOOCs that focus on the lived experiences of Africans, we offer an account of our experiences of Africa’s first MOOC on African philosophy of education. During 2016, a MOOC titled “Teaching for change: An African philosophical approach” was presented on the British-based FutureLearn platform. It was the first MOOC on African philosophy of education, making it unique to the global context. Like any philosophy of education (Anglo- Saxon, Continental, Chinese, Arabian and Buddhist), African philosophy of education is an activity, that is, something that is being done. The ratio-
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nale for prioritising African interests, such as the call for the decolonisation of higher education in South Africa, economic growth and democratisation, foreground an African philosophy of education. The course attracted 5000 participants from around the world (including participants from South Africa). This MOOC was open to all students interested in teaching and learning within an African context and to learn about cultivating pedagogical encounters related to Africa. During the four-week course, the following topics were covered: • African thinking and doing: A way of practising philosophy of education; • Educational encounters as forms of human engagement through an examination of case studies; • Moral, compassionate and restorative justice concerning defensible African education • Teaching and learning in the context of change; • Ethno-philosophy and communitarian philosophy of education about ubuntu and justice; and • Identification of significant problems on the African continent and an examination of their implications for African education. One of the underlying themes of the MOOC was learning about achieving social justice. African societies are often characterised by high levels of inequality, poverty, human suffering and inhumanity. Through the use of selected case studies and conceptual clarifications with landmark events in recent African history, participants could learn about how education in Africa was unfolding at the time, in particular regarding the challenges that confronted it. Participants were conscientious about getting a sense of the problems the African continent faced, and then how an African philosophy of education could be used to respond to these problems. Case study videos included food security, combating terrorism, student protest and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. The course videos were presented in an instructivist manner. However, they were used for scaffolding students towards more self-directed activities, allowing these students to realise their autonomy. This approach to the MOOC ensured that participants in an online sphere experienced openness and mutual respect and were able to deliberate on the discussion forums of the platform and share their contextualised understanding of the various African philosophical concepts in question. In the final part of
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the MOOC, participants contemplated how these problems might be resolved with the application of different spheres of justice, namely moral, compassionate and restorative—those educational aspects of justice that had emerged as significant action concepts to minimise and alleviate human contestation, insecurity and suffering. In light of its successful initiation, we offer an account of our experiences of the students’ engagement on the MOOC with reference to the concepts developed in the previous chapters. A reflection on the discussion forums of the MOOC highlighted the connectivist principles that fostered the creation of inclusive learning spaces. Testimony to this was participants’ ability to share their own contextualised ideas and perspectives on the discussion forums, without having to be assimilated and acculturated into the ideas and ideologies of others. Such an understanding of MOOCs in light of the cosmopolitanist view which we argued for in Chap. 1 by implication means that university students have an obligation towards engendering respect for cultural distinctiveness together with the enactment of human responsibility. Students, therefore, would be expected to confront contemporary societal issues related to an unequal balance of power in which individuals are subjected to prejudice, inequality and other forms of injustices through critical argumentation and deliberation. It was evident from the case that students demonstrated their equal ability to articulate matters of interest and apprehension, questioning and evaluation of one another, without fear of being coerced or intimidated. By implication, the participants in the course demonstrated their willingness to listen to and accept revisions concerning their proposed claims on the discussion forums. However, such conditions cannot be realised without what we explored in Chap. 2 concerning the cultivation of human relationships premised on the basis of unconditional hospitality. In individual encounters on discussion platforms on MOOCs, students may accept that their arguments and propositions are theoretically unfounded or uninformed. While in contrasting encounters on MOOC discussion platforms students may not be forthcoming and instead submerged to display acts of resentment towards others. The latter scenario may be foregrounded on the basis of students’ arguments and propositions not accepted as part of the discourse, thus leading to hospitality as being conditional. A cosmopolitan education on the basis of unconditional hospitality by implication infers that students through acts of affective expression display a sense of forgiveness of the unforgivable irrespective of whether their arguments or propositions are not suited to the discourse.
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When the participants in the MOOC posted their ideas on the discussion forums, they were held accountable through other participants probing their claims and, in turn, held others accountable for their claims. This level of accountability resonates with what we explored earlier in Chap. 4 regarding rooted cosmopolitanism. The democratic deliberations that ensued centred sources of cosmopolitan rootedness as a means of enacting inclusive and just education for all participants in the discussion forums. By implication, the students, through this notion of rooted cosmopolitanism, were not detached from their situated context, but rather embedded and coupled with the students in the discussion forums as one community. This idea of a single equitable and just community was further foregrounded on the basis of the students’ cultural, geographical, historical and linguistic elements that constituted their embeddedness within the situated context. Due to the public nature of the MOOC, with open discussion forums, the level of carefulness was raised when participants expressed themselves in this public domain. In Chap. 5, we argued that the encounter of cultures is themselves mostly structured or unjust legacies of subordination. By implication, a conflict of distinct cultures may render those who do not conform to the dominant groups’ ideologies or thoughts as silenced thus perpetuating this unequal encounter premised on routine structures and subordination. What we argue for instead through cosmopolitan education, is an ideal educational approach necessary in disrupting a culture of carefulness prevalent in the public domain. This sense of disruption is further realised when the communities within which students are embedded embrace the virtue of openness. The idea of a culture premised on the virtue of openness is what we argue for further necessary in disrupting the hegemonic structures of power which may materialise in discussion forums on MOOCs in instances where students or university educators exert some form of subordination overs in the community. Furthermore, a cosmopolitan education that centres around difference to what we termed earlier in Chap. 4 as a difference-based cosmopolitan education may further assist in averting the debilitating effects of hegemony. A difference-based cosmopolitan education we infer is further necessary for explicating the complimentary relationship grounded on human commonalities that may ensue between an encounter of cultures and not merely a choice of one culture over the other. By implication, democratic iterations on MOOC discussion platforms are only legitimate if the contextual background context of their occurrence is characterised by communicative freedom, the right to have rights.
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Of course, the MOOC did not function as some form of utopian educational platform. For one, some participants remarked that, although the course was about an African philosophical approach, they could not identify the themes as uniquely African or ubiquitous to the African experience. Second, some participants contended that the MOOC was simply too short, and elucidated that there are indeed other African theories to teaching and learning, which were not included in the course. Our experiences of the MOOC on African philosophy of education further provided insight into the development and adaptation of MOOCs in South African higher education institutions. First, the North–South knowledge partnership between the FutureLearn platform and the participating university in South Africa demonstrated the potential for course production regarding African philosophy from a Global South perspective. By implication, in the African context, the MOOC addressed the North–South imbalances of knowledge flows in MOOCs as a means of disrupting the neo-colonial sphere. More specifically, disrupting such a sphere in which MOOCs have functioned for more than a decade in order to have the MOOC advancing the development of African culture, heritage and identity through working towards decolonising the functioning of MOOCs. Second, the MOOC premised on both instructivist and connectivist theories demonstrated that teaching and learning in secondary and higher education contexts in South Africa need to be attuned to the fusion of these theories commensurate with a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework. By implication, teaching and learning foregrounded by a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework are further necessary for (higher education) educators in South Africa to adapt MOOCs in the Global South, which are both relevant and meaningful to the African experience. Third, a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework is particularly relevant to the South African context, particularly with the quest for higher and secondary education institutions to transition towards Fourth Industrial Revolution teaching and learning. For MOOCs to function effectively in higher education, we argue that teaching should always be attuned to a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework that aims to make (higher education) educators aware of their obligation to their students and learners in classroom contexts. This obligation further extends to include (higher education) educators demonstrating a willingness to disrupt a culture of resistance in educational institutions, one where students and learners are capable of sharing their lived experiences with others. Such an obligation further implies that educator-student power hierarchies are disrupted.
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Disrupting educator-student power hierarchies, guarantees the possibility of teaching and learning interactions to be democratised, and one where MOOCs may function effectively in a changing South African higher education context. In line with the view of agonistic cosmopolitics argued for in Chap. 6, learners in the MOOC have been treated as heterogeneous beings with different moral needs, interests, and by implication, pedagogical expectations. What follows, is that judgements offered by learners on pedagogical matters have not been treated as universalist, but rather, attuned to difference and otherness. This was followed by an adherence to deliberation as a pedagogical strategy in the MOOC—as articulated in Chap. 7—to attend to diverse educational encounters among MOOC teachers and students. In the main, students in the MOOC were encouraged to reimagine events in the world and to conjure up ways as to respond to ethico-political situations, as enunciated in Chap. 8. By far, the most illuminating pedagogical initiative taken by students in the MOOC, in line with the cosmopolitanist arguments in Chap. 9, has been the willingness by students in the MOOC to respond openly and reflexively to what they hold dear and, simultaneously, remaining open to what is still to come.
Summary In this chapter, we explored a cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework drawing on the critical thoughts of Young’s (2000) deliberative democratic model and Appiah’s (2006) two strands of cosmopolitanism. We contend that a cosmopolitanist-deliberative democratic approach can offer the implementation of MOOCs some ways as to why and how difference, dissent and otherness can be cultivated among South African students and learners. A cosmopolitanist-deliberative framework may further offer educators the means to disrupt an institutional culture of resistance in South African schools, one where learners are treated as mere recipients of information, towards transitioning these learners into co-constructors of knowledge. We argue that the latter is further necessary for school learners to transition into higher education institutions where MOOCs have begun to expand in South Africa. Africa’s first MOOC on African philosophy, “Teaching for change” served as a revolution and testimony of the need to strengthen the Global North and South knowledge partnerships. We thus explored in this chapter the need for MOOCs in South Africa to be attuned to establishing African identity, culture and heritage through an African
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philosophy of education. A MOOC that places African learners and students at the fulcrum of their learning, we contend, is a step towards disrupting the Global North homogeneity of MOOCs and in decolonising the functioning of MOOCs that have dominated for more than a decade in the global environment.
References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Ethics in a world of strangers. New York, NY: Norton. Biesta, G. (2009). Sporadic democracy: Education, democracy and the question of inclusion. In M. Katz, S. Verducci, & G. Biesta (Eds.), Education, democracy and the moral life (pp. 101–112). Washington, DC: Springer. Biesta, G. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Bouchard, P. (2009). Pedagogy without a teacher: What are the limits? International Journal of Self-Directed Learning, 6(2):13–22. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://www.sdlglobal.com/IJSDL/IJSDL6.2-2009.pdf Freire, P. (2003). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2006). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Garrido, M., Koepke, L., Andersen, S., Mena, A., Macapagal, M., & Dalvit, L. (2016). An examination of MOOC usage for professional workforce development outcomes in Colombia, the Philippines, & South Africa. Seattle, WA: Technology & Social Change Group, University of Washington Information School. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, Volume. I: Reason and the rationalization of society. London: Heinemann. King, M., Pegrum, M., & Forsey, M. (2018). MOOCs and OER in the Global South: Problems and potential. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(5), 1–19. Kizilcec, R. F., Saltarelli, A. J., Reich, J., & Cohen, G. L. (2017). Closing global achievement gaps in MOOCs. Science, 355(6322), 251–252. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.aag2063. Liyanagunawardena, T. R., & Williams, S. A. (2015). Massive open online courses and perspectives from learners in developing countries. Vistas Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9, 19–37. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://digital.lib.ou.ac.lk/docs/bitstream/701300122/1237/1/ paper2.pdf. MacIntyre, A. (1999). Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues. Peru, IL: Open Court. Onah, D. F., Sinclair, J., Boyatt, R., & Foss, J. (2014). Massive open online courses: Learners participation. Paper presented at 7th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI), 15 July 2019. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11576-014-0405-7
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Blurb
The subject of this book is cosmopolitan education. We argue that cosmopolitan education is an act of engaging with difference, others, otherness and inclusion/exclusion. Our contention is that cosmopolitan education can engender inclusive human encounters in which freedom and rationality guided by co-operative, co-existential and oppositional acts of resistance, can be exercised. The central theme we engage with throughout the book is an expanded view of cosmopolitan education that has the potential to cultivate deliberative pedagogical encounters in universities. In the main, arguments proffered in defence of an expanded view of cosmopolitan education centre around the enactment of universal hospitality, unconditional engagement, difference, rootedness, learning from others and other cultures, judgements, democratic justice, deliberative iteration, and reflexivity and openness. Yusef Waghid is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy of Education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is the author of Towards a philosophy of caring in higher education: pedagogy and nuances of care (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and co-author with Nuraan Davids of The thinking university expanded: On profanation, play and education (2019). Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu is Lecturer of Philosophy of Education in the School of Education at Chancellor College at the University of Malawi. He is co-editor with Yusef Waghid of Education for decoloniality and decolonisation in Africa (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2
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Judith Terblanche is a professional chartered accountant working as a senior lecturer in the Department of Accounting at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her doctorate in philosophy of education from Stellenbosch University, focuses on cultivating social responsibility within accounting education. Faiq Waghid is a lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s Centre for Innovative Educational Technology (CIET). He is co-author with Zayd Waghid and Yusef Waghid of Educational technology and pedagogic encounters: Democratic education in potentiality (2016); and Rupturing African philosophy on teaching and learning: Ubuntu justice and education (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Zayd Waghid is a senior lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s Faculty of Education. He is co-author with Faiq Waghid and Yusef Waghid of Educational technology and pedagogic encounters: Democratic education in potentiality (2016); and Rupturing African philosophy on teaching and learning: Ubuntu justice and education (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Index
A Accountability acts of, 132 level of, 132, 136 notion of, 131 structures of, 65 understanding of, 132 virtue of, 132, 133 Act of accountability, 132 of aggression, 3, 5 of apartheid, 14 of care, 88 of censorships, 10 of deliberative iterations, 18 of disrespect, 2 of embrace, 98 of engagement, ix, 18 ethically, 87 of forgiveness, xi, 15 of hospitality, 11, 12 of hostility, 3 of humane co-existence, 12 of human engagement, ix, 18 of humane living, 12 immoral, 4
of interruption, 11, 16 of rationality, 2 of relational care, 113 of repentance, 14 of representing the voiceless, 132 of resistance, xi responsibly, 112 of teaching, 114 of terror, 11 of terrorism, 10 uncosmopolitan, 12 of violence, 3, 14 of xenophobia, 12 Actions, cosmopolitan, see Cosmopolitan, actions Africa, 125 African context, vi, 48, 117, 122–124, 127, 133, 134, 137, 138 continent, 6, 7, 134 countries, 12 culture, 7, 123, 137, 138 education, vii, xiv, 48, 75, 124, 125, 133, 134, 137, 138 experience, xiv, 48, 75, 123, 124, 133, 137
© The Author(s) 2020 Y. Waghid et al., Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38427-2
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African (cont.) governments, 48 heritage, 137, 138 history, 7, 134 identity, 137, 138 interests, 134 knowledge, xiv, 126 knowledge sharing, xiv, 124 languages, 48 learners, vii, xiv, 123–125, 133, 138, 139 nations, 75, 82, 122 notion of ubuntu, 92, 116, 118 people, 7 philosophical approach, 133, 137 philosophical concepts, 134 philosophy, 137, 138 philosophy of education, 133, 134, 137, 139 societies, 134 students, vii, xiv, 122–126, 133, 134, 138, 139 theories to teaching and learning, 137 thinking, 12, 134 youths, 68 Apartheid, 7, 15 acts of, 14 Argument analytic, 95 deliberating, 95 human, xi, 4, 8 Kantian, xi rational, 95, 131 valid, 128 Argumentation critical (see Critical, argumentation) impromptu, 113 Asylum political, 11 right to, 11 seekers, 12
Autonomy exercise of, 34 as humans, xi of the individual, xii, 25, 30, 68 student, 127, 134 B Beliefs intrinsic, 94 own, vi, 87, 116 C Care act of, 88 compassionate, 96 demonstrate, 110, 117, 118 ethical, 88, 91, 95 moral, 88, 89, 95, 96 notion of, 73, 91, 95–96 relational, 113–115 in students, 95 through deliberation, 100 Citizen cosmopolitan, 7 of countries, 11, 100 democratic, 72, 75, 100 global, 30, 56 responsible, 100 in the world, x, xi, 2–8, 10, 18 of the world, 18 of Yemen, 3 Citizenship cosmopolitan, 37, 38, 58, 61 democratic, 7, 48, 99, 100 global, 30, 31, 37, 61 shared, 128, 129 world, 5–7 cMOOCs, 123, 127 Coercion, 68, 129 forms of, 68, 129
INDEX
Colonialism hierarchies of, 48 legacy of, 36 Coloniality, 7, 36, 46 Commonality concept of, 31 human, 28, 61, 62, 69, 136 Compassion, 96, 100 Compassionate, 134, 135 Connectivism, 126, 127 Connectivist, vii, 123, 125–127, 135, 137 Consciousness, 112, 130, 132 moral, 132 Cosmopolitan actions, 4, 19 activity, 57 ambitions, 50, 62 aspect, 43 aspirations, xii, 42, 58, 76 aspirations of equality, xii, 42 attention, 4, 67 attitudes, 43, 100 being, 2, 10 capacity, 46 citizens, 2, 7 citizenship, 37, 38, 58, 61 commitment, 66 configurations, 27 deliberative, vi, vii, 127–133 democratic education, 131 dialogue, 116, 117 dimension, xii, 42, 67, 74 dispensation, 117 duty, 4, 67 education, vi, vii, ix, x, xiii, 5, 18, 25–27, 30–39, 42, 47–50, 54, 55, 59, 62, 63, 73, 100, 125, 136 educational encounters, x, xiii, 27, 54 encounters, x, xiii, 14, 18, 24, 27
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epistemology, 60 ethic, 55, 56, 59 goals, x horizons, 93 hospitality, 3, 16, 67 human encounters, 18 humanism, 4, 5 ideals, xii, 21, 38, 42, 47, 48, 54, 62 impartial values, 62 judgements, 56–58 justice, 58 knowledge, 57 living, 4 manner, ix, 2 -minded, 106, 107, 109, 110 norms, vi, 18–28, 58, 62, 67, 69 notion, xi, 2, 5, 130 orientation, 110, 113, 114 outlook, 76, 107 perspective, 111 point of view, 130 project, 60, 67 purpose, xi quality, 63 right, 11, 47 rules, 58 sense, 60, 116 skills, 24, 48 spirit, 44 thinking, 58–63 thought, x, xi, xiii, 63, 86, 88, 89, 91, 109 un-, 2 universalism (see Universalism, cosmopolitan) values, 58, 67, 69 virtues, 47, 61–63, 69 world, 3, 83, 90, 100 Cosmopolitanism deep, 106 deliberative, 20, 24, 27, 86–100
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Cosmopolitanism (cont.) of difference, vi, ix, xi, 18–19, 21, 24, 27, 31, 33–35, 42, 48, 60–63, 128 difference-based, xi, 27, 136 difference-grounded, 18–19, 24 eccentric, 87–89, 91, 99, 100 eccentric ethico-political, 91, 92, 94, 99 educating for, 58–59 education, 36, 63, 69, 99–100 educational, 5–7, 19, 30, 54, 59–61, 69, 106, 109–111, 114–119 elucidation of, 19, 129 essentialist, 36, 61, 63, 65 ethically just, 100 ethico-political, 87–91, 93, 100 of forgiveness, 10 form of, 24, 32, 48, 50, 60, 65, 66, 69 foundation of, 43, 89 global, 36, 60, 93 ideal, xiii, 42, 62, 88–90, 95, 96, 99 impartial, 32, 36 impartialist, 61 inclusive, xi, 30, 107 as interruption, 10–16 notion of, xi, xiii, 7, 10, 30, 42, 49, 50, 69, 89, 97, 107, 111, 127, 133, 136 objective, 19, 36 radical, 30–33, 65 reflexive, xiii, 114, 118 rooted, vi, xi, xii, 30, 33–35, 37, 38, 136 scripted, xii, 54, 58–62, 69 sound, 33 stoic, 3 strand of, 128, 131, 132, 138 subjective, 19 thinking, 60–63 thinking according to, 60
Cosmopolitanist cause, 92 curriculum, 123, 127 -deliberative, xiv, 122–139 Cosmopolitics, xii, 63, 69, 138 Crimes against humanity, xi, 14–16 unjust, 16 Critical analytical capacities, 127 argumentation, xi, 7, 8, 135 aspects, 26 engagement, 49, 90 examination, 48 history, 61 innovation, 123 judgement, 112 re-examination, 122 reflection, 97, 100, 107 responses, 7 self-reflection, 94, 95, 132 skills, 100 stance, 108 thinking, v, 95, 123 thought, 138 un-, 6, 82 Cultural being, 44, 45 communities, 49 difference, vi, xi, 5, 6, 8, 42, 50, 122 diversity, 24, 43, 55 encounters, 44, 46–47, 136 evolution, 43 perspectives, vii, 47, 117 Culture contrastive, 44 global, 24, 46, 55 hegemonic, 74, 76 local, 46, 56 non-mainstream, 48 of resistance, 123, 137, 138 subaltern, 46–48 subordinate, 46–47
INDEX
D Decoloniality, 7, 117 Deliberation democratic, xi, 18–21, 23–27, 39, 72, 75, 76 dialogic, 65 in education, 24, 30, 50, 72, 75, 77–78, 81–83, 110, 136 educational, xi, 19, 23, 25–27, 30, 39, 72–83, 97, 117, 119 in educational domains, 30, 77, 78 infinite, 16 in the institution, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80–82 layers of, 72–74 notion of, xi, 22, 25, 67, 72, 83, 136 process, 72, 77 spirit of, 77, 81 Deliberative action, 18, 93, 97, 113, 118, 129, 132 acts, xi, 18, 98, 113, 118 approach, 128, 133, 138 attitude, 79, 80, 92, 97 cosmopolitanism, xiii, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30, 38, 65, 86–100, 111, 125, 129, 133, 138 democracy, xiii, 80, 86, 125 democratic model, 138 dialogue, 18, 117, 118 education, vi, xiii, 24, 27, 38, 77, 86–100, 118, 125, 128, 129, 133, 137 encounter, xi, xiii, 18, 23, 30, 77, 80, 86, 87, 96–98, 110, 112, 113, 132, 133 engagement, 18, 80, 129, 133 forms of universalism, 65 framework, xiv, 65, 92 iterations, 18 pedagogical interventions, 92 process, 23, 24, 27, 80, 112, 113
147
reflection, 96, 97, 100 research, 93, 94, 100, 124 spirit, xi theory of education, 133 universalism, 25, 26, 65 Democracy deliberative, xiii, 75, 80, 86, 125 dialogic, 64 ideal, 49, 75–77, 89 inclusive, 61 just, 72, 75, 78, 80, 89 meaningful, 76, 78 models of, 63 structures of, 48, 49 theory of, 64 transformative, 78 Democratic approach, 55, 128, 133, 138 citizens, 33, 75, 100 citizenship, 7, 48, 99, 100 citizenship education, v, vi, 99, 100 co-existence, 12, 55 communities, 12, 15, 127 countries, 99, 100 cultures, 25 decision-making, 128, 131 deliberation, 39, 75, 76, 136 demands, 79 education, 26, 77, 125, 128, 131 ideals, 79 inclusion, 128 institutions, 21, 25, 33, 37, 49, 72 iterations, xi, 18–21, 23–28, 129, 136 life, 37, 43, 72, 79 model, 138 norms, 20, 33, 49, 75, 79 notion, 127–133 people, 19 re-beginning, 15 society, 33, 49, 72, 109 South Africa, 15
148
INDEX
Democratic (cont.) structures, 75 systems, 72 theory of education, 133 un-, 125 understanding of education, 125, 133 virtues, 79 Dialogue cosmopolitan, 117 deliberative, 117, 118 facilitation, 116 meaningful, 88 opportunity for, 116 Dignity human, xi, 3, 22, 24, 25, 114 moral, 73 personal, 92 unqualified, 25 Disadvantaged communities, xiv, 123, 124, 127 historically, xiv, 122–124, 127 minority, 79 -ness, 82 Discourse accountable, 131, 133 normative, 20, 35, 43 Disrespect, 2, 129 Disruption deliberate, 100 sufficient, 111 Diversity context of, 55 cultural, 43, 55 global, 59, 60 human, 60 and inclusivity course, 5, 7 and inclusivity curriculum, 7 of opinions, 126 rich, 93 Duties abstract, 24 associative, 34
attributes of, 33 cosmopolitan, 67 ethical, xi, 30, 32, 38 of impartiality, 32 moral, xi, 30 norms and, 33 of partiality, 33 priority of, 33 of a teacher, 54 universal/universalistic, 32, 33 E Education access, xiv, 49, 122, 124 in Africa, xiv, 48, 124, 134 African, vii, 48, 75, 122–139 aims of, 19, 24–26, 72, 73, 81, 110 approaches to, v–vii, 24, 128 aspects of, 19, 35, 37, 115, 135 Buddhist, ix, 133 commodification of, 49 conventional, 46 cosmopolitan (see Cosmopolitan, education) deliberative, vi, xiii, 26, 38, 75, 77, 86, 92–100, 125, 127–133 democratic, xiii, 24–27, 37, 39, 48, 55, 72, 77, 99, 100, 125, 127–133 dimensions of, 82 dimension to, 94 domain of, 30, 35, 61, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83 enabling condition for, 14 enterprise, 49, 76 epistemologies, 27, 48, 81 exclusion in, 46, 50, 76 exclusive, 25, 42, 48, 50, 69 form of, ix, x, 35, 48, 50, 76, 78, 137 higher, vi, vii, xiv, 19, 24–27, 49, 122–139
INDEX
human, 25, 109 impartial, 27 implications for, 106–119, 134 inclusive, 27 institutions, vii, 81, 123, 124, 137, 138 just, 39, 83, 136 kind of, ix matters, 7, 27, 35–38 model of, vii, 55, 73 modern, v, 24, 27, 31, 36, 42, 46–50, 73–76 Muslim, ix notion of, 25, 111, 127–133 philosophers of, 86 philosophy of, 133, 134, 137, 139 policy, 62 practice of, 83 primary, 61 project, 81 purpose of, 95 systems, vii, 81 tertiary, 122 for thinking, 58–63 today, 24, 42, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 83 understandings of, ix, 125, 133 university, 82, 118 Educational agendas, 5 aims, 19, 25, 26, 72, 73, 81 aspects, 135 concerns, xi context, 114, 115 curricula, 30, 73 curriculums, 30 deliberation, 78 domains, 30, 61, 77, 78, 80 elements, 72 encounters, x, xii, xiii, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 27, 30, 31, 54–69, 72–83, 97, 113, 134, 138 experiences, 27, 81
149
frameworks, 35 human encounters, 14 institutions, 26, 54, 58, 75, 77, 78, 122, 137 landscape, 109, 116 matters, 7, 27 perspective, 78 policies, 39, 62, 77 potential, xiv, 124 practice, 55, 75, 76, 109 process, 112 spaces, 74, 117 values, 42, 73, 109, 115 Educative encounter, 13–16, 18 relationships, 14, 15 Encounter cultural, 44, 46–47, 136 deliberative, xi, 23, 75, 80, 87, 96–98, 110, 112, 113, 132, 133 of difference, 74, 78 educational, x, xii, xiii, 14, 19, 23, 25, 27, 30, 31, 54–69, 72–83, 97, 113, 134, 138 educative (see Educative, encounter) higher educational, xiii just, xii, 54 learner–learner, 72 learner–teacher, 72 new, 14 with the other, xiii, 24, 31, 44, 67, 86, 110 with otherness, 23 pedagogical, x, xi, xiii, 86, 123, 134 person–institution, 72 person-to-person, 72 responsive, 77, 111 transformative, 132 vexing, 99
150
INDEX
Engagement act of, ix, 18 critical, 49, 90 deliberative, 18, 129, 133 with difference, vi, vii, ix dignified, 44 forms of, 14, 18, 30, 134 human, ix, 3, 10, 13, 14, 18, 134 non-, 116 rational, 3, 10 rules of, 57–59 student, 113, 129, 133, 135 terms of, 80 Environment abstract, 79 appropriate, 92 changing, xiv, 124 controlled, 79, 81 ethically safe, 99 global, 122, 139 local, 100 problems, 94 shared, 117 unsafe, 111 Equal ability, 135 beings, 130 concern, 32, 50 conditions, 114 human relationships, xi, 16, 117, 118, 135 intelligence, 113 opportunity, 129 respect, 2 right, 129 terms, 129 treatment, 32 Equality aspirations of, xii, 42 global, 81 moral, 32 political, 129
Ethical agents, 111 attitude, 92 call for justice, 110, 112 care, 95 caring, 88, 96 community, 34, 35 concerns, 35 cosmopolitan world, 100 duties, xi, 30, 32, 38 future, 90 hope, 99 imagination, 91, 97 notion of care, 91, 95–96 obligation, 35 person, xii, 30, 33 realm, 33, 35 relations, 35 response, 87, 89–94, 110 responsibility, 87, 93, 94, 96 self, 33, 107 self-improvement, 106, 109 significance, 35 Ethics of cosmopolitanism, 32, 107 principle of, 47, 108 of self-improvement, 106–108 Exclusion of culture, xii, 42 human, x of the local, 62, 76 F Forgiveness act of (see Act, of forgiveness) interruption of, xi, 15 potential of, 16 predicament, 16 unconditional, 16 Fourth Industrial Revolution, xiv, 122, 124, 127, 137
INDEX
Freedom from coercion, 68, 129 communicative, xi, 21–23, 28, 64–66, 136 from domination, 129 exercise of, x, xi of expression, x, 128 form of, 130 individual, 68 of others, 63 task of, 130 of the will, 68 G Global citizen, 30, 56 citizenship, 31, 37, 61 community, 30 cosmopolitanism, 36 diversity, 59, 60 education, vi, 47 interconnectedness, 19, 55, 73, 75, 81 justice, 64 order, 36, 38, 47, 61, 63, 65, 81 Globalisation, 44–46, 81 H Hospitable, 13, 107 Hospitality conditional, 12–14, 16, 135 cosmopolitan (see Cosmopolitan, hospitality) excluded, 11 human (see Human, hospitality) unconditional, xi, 12, 13, 16, 18, 135 universal, xi, 8, 11, 12, 95 violence of, 68
151
Hostility absence of, 97 acts of, 3 Human action, xiii, 2, 18 act of repentance, 14 argument, xi, 4 behaviour, 36 being, vi, xi, xii, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 24–26, 31–33, 35–37, 39, 42, 44, 45, 50, 56, 59, 61, 62, 67–69, 78, 96, 111 co-existence, 12, 14, 15 commonality, 22, 24, 27, 28, 48, 61, 62, 69, 136 communities, 2, 22, 33, 44, 62, 64 condition, 18, 46, 76, 77 co-operation, xi, 7, 12, 14 difference, 7, 34 dignity, xi, 3, 4, 22, 24, 25, 114 diversity, 55, 60 encounters, xi, xiii, 14–16, 18 endeavour, xi, 18, 111 engagement (see Engagement, human) equality, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, 32, 56, 60, 62 existence, 60 experiences, 16, 45, 59, 130 hospitality, 3, 12 ideas, 6 impartiality, 32, 61 inclusion, x inclusivity, x injustices (see Injustices, human) interaction, ix, 19, 50 interests, x, 27, 35, 68 justice, 15 life, 33, 128 lives, 33, 128 living, 5, 6
152
INDEX
Human (cont.) nature, 19, 22, 25–27, 48–50, 73, 74, 79 passions, 5 person, 34 plurality, 55, 63 practices, 10 problems, xi, 2, 3, 6 relations, x, 13, 14, 19, 38 relationships, xi, 16, 117, 118, 135 responsibilities, xi, 8, 10, 12, 18, 21, 135 rights, 3, 6, 20–22, 55, 65, 68 sciences, 36 societies, 15, 21, 46, 50, 54 starvation, 4, 67 story, 48 subjectivities, 47, 62 wisdom, 45 Humanity attributes of, 42, 43 right for, 22 shared, 32, 91, 98, 99 universal, 55, 65 Humanness, 24, 111 I Impartiality, xi, 30, 32, 33, 61 Inclusion human (see Human, inclusion) understanding of, 129 Inclusive cosmopolitan education, 30 cosmopolitanism, xi, 30 curriculum, 119 democracy, 61 democratic justice, 21 education, 27, 39, 42, 50, 136 humanity, 107 human relations, x learning, 26, 135
pedagogical practices, 93 spaces, x, 125, 135 Inequality economic, 88 eradication of, 6, 114 global, 82 structured, 79 Injustice global, 49, 93, 94 social, xiv, 80, 124 societal, 7 Injustices cultural, 46 human, 15 inner, 66 internal, 66 local, 49 peculiar, 48 societal, 100 Instructivism, 123, 125–127 Instructivist, vii, 123, 125–127, 134, 137 J Judgements bad, 58 condition of, 57 delay of, 117 Justice aspirations for, 60 call for, 110, 112, 118 demands of, 106 democratic, xiii, 21 dimensions, 54 fight for, 94 for all, 92, 94, 106, 107 global, 35, 64 ideal of, 60 notion of, xiii, 107 practice of, 57 restorative, 134, 135
INDEX
social, vii, 33, 35, 72, 86, 87, 89, 92, 99, 100, 107, 115, 124, 134 societal, 92 spheres of, 135 L Learning design, 126, 127 difference in, x dominant modes of, 122 endeavours of, xii, 42 environment, 111 forms of, 124 inclusive, 135 lifelong, 128 open to, 113 opportunities, xiv, 124 platforms, 123 problem-based, 123 process, 111, 113, 126 project-based, 123 safe space, 98 theories, 126, 127 M Marginalisation, 36, 47, 74, 76, 78, 81, 82 Massive open online courses (MOOCs), vii, xiv, 122–139 Moral agents, 22, 111 agreement, 86 attention, 62 beings, 56, 77 capacity, 66 care, 89, 95 caring, 88 concern, 31, 34, 35, 56, 132 consciousness, 132
dignity, 73 dilemmas, 54, 79 dimension, 54, 87, 94, 116 dissatisfaction, 80 duties (see Duties, moral) horizons, 86 idea, 128 imagination, 91, 97 impetus, 117 interactions, 56 interests, xii, 54 judgements, 2, 33 necessity, 64 needs, xii, 54, 138 notion of care, 91, 95–96 obligation, 19 outlook, 72–74 person, xii, 22, 54 principles, 21, 28, 44 promise, 111 relativism, 21 respect, 54, 59, 77–79, 86–89 response, 91, 93–94 responsibility, 93, 94 right, 11 standards, 2 standpoint, 22, 131 universalism, 31, 42, 54, 64, 65 values, 54, 64, 69 views, 50 virtues, 79 world, 4 Morality call for, 114 communitarian, 92 of cosmopolitanism, 32, 107, 108 informal, 47 of justice, 106, 118 prescriptive, 93, 114 proscriptive, 93
153
154
INDEX
N Neo-Kantian understanding, 2 view, 2–8, 10 Normative conceptualisations, 22, 31 concern, 31 legitimacy, 21 obligations, 23 validity, 21 Norms universal, 20 universalist, 20 O Objectivity, 19, 31, 69 Open-minded, 107, 109 Openness reflective, 106–108 reflexive, xiii Oppressed, the, 21, 80, 96, 97, 129, 130 Oppression, 21, 23, 38, 65–67, 72, 76, 80, 96, 130 Oppressors, 97, 129, 130 Otherness, vii, ix, x, xiii, 13, 18, 20–24, 26, 30, 35, 36, 47, 54, 58, 65, 74, 76–79, 81, 82, 93, 125, 128, 129, 133, 138 encounters with, 75 Outsider, 6, 66, 68 P Pedagogical challenges, 123 encounters (see Encounters, pedagogical) framework, 123, 124 practices, xiii, 86, 93, 95–98, 100, 115, 116, 118, 125, 126 spaces, x
Philosophy, 31, 113 African, 137, 138 Philosophy of education, 133, 134 African, 133, 134, 137, 138 Pluralism cultural, 65, 66, 68 expressions of, 66 global, 65, 69 Political horizons, 86 institutions, 37 processes, 37 transformation, 7 Practices human (see Human, practices) social, ix, 38 Prejudice, xi, 7, 8, 47, 79, 80, 135 racial, 7 R Racism, 4, 7 Rational aspirations, 5 beings, 2, 35, 61 capacities, 31 engagement, 3, 10 explication, 7 expression, 131 humanity, 4 Rationality, x, xi, 2, 4 condition of, 18 Reflect, 34, 59, 63, 89, 93, 94, 100, 106, 110, 115, 116 willingness to, 106, 107 Reflection critical, 97, 100, 107 emotional, 115 purpose of, 106 Reflective distance, 115 educators, 112, 114, 115, 118 openness, 106–108
INDEX
stance, 96, 108, 112, 118 Relationship educative, 13–15 hospitable, 13 Relativism, 20 moral, 21 Resistance to critical innovation, 123 culture of, 123 Respect attitude of, 96 equal, 2 mutual, 38, 77–80, 128, 129, 133, 134 of persons, 79 worthy of, 25 Responsibility, xi, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 21, 25, 35, 57, 73, 88–90, 93, 94, 100, 110–112, 115–117, 135 ethical, 87, 94, 96 Responsiveness, 4, 108, 114, 118 Right of residence, 12 to temporary refuge, 11, 16 Rights universal (see Universal, rights) visitation, 11, 14 Rooted, cosmopolitanism, see Cosmopolitanism, rooted Rootedness aspects of, 34 elements of, 36, 38 individual, vi, xii, 30, 38 S Self -actualisation, 68, 77 -articulation, 23 aspirations of, 36 -contained, 66 -criticism, xiii, 43 -defense, 3
155
-definition, 23 -directed, 134 embedded, 33 ethical, 33, 107 -governing, 20 -growth, 109, 113, 118 hood, 4 -identity, 77 -improvement, 106–109 -interested, 75, 76 -interests, 131 -introspection, xiii -pedagogy, 113 -preservation, 90 -proclaimed, 11 -reflection/-reflective, vi, 94, 95 -reflexive, xiii, 113, 118, 132 -reflexivity, 132 -righteous, 59, 79 -sufficiency, 50 -sufficient, 25, 42, 46, 48 -sustaining, 46 the, xiii, 34, 87–89, 91–95, 98, 100, 106–111, 113, 114, 116–118 transcendent, 24, 25, 31, 59, 60, 73, 78 -transformation, 89 Social cohesion, 89, 94, 96, 114, 118 enlightenment, 4 mobility, 37 transformation, 31, 87, 107 values, 43 world, 4 Societal change, 111, 112, 117–119 concerns, 6, 111 difficulties, 94 inequities, xiv, 124 injustice, 7, 100 justice, 92 problems, 94 transformation, 114
156
INDEX
South African context, 122–124, 133, 137, 138 higher education, 122–139 higher education institutions, 123, 124, 137, 138 learners, vii, 123–125, 133, 138 schools, 123–125, 138 students, vii, 125, 133, 134, 138 universities, 123, 125, 133–138 Speech free, 129 harmful, xiii unjust, xiii T Teacher background, 54, 56, 62, 69 duties, 54 education, 124 roles, 54, 56, 58–62, 78 Teaching approaches, x, 26, 130 for change, 133 experiential, 123 forms of, 123, 130 and learning, xiv, 2, 19, 26, 48, 56, 57, 61, 63, 95, 96, 99, 100, 106, 113, 115–118, 122–125, 127, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138 methods, x, 19, 27 pedagogical, 95, 99, 100, 125 practices, 95, 96, 99, 100, 115, 116, 122, 123, 125 process, 56, 112, 113 strategy, 95, 96 theories, 137 university, 2, 124 Thinking African, 12, 134 critical, v, 95, 123
development, 122 mode of, 122 rational, 131 Transformation, 7, 43, 79, 82, 88, 89, 97–100, 108, 112, 113, 115, 116 societal, 114 Truthfulness, virtue of, 132, 133 U Ubuntu -inspired practices, 93, 100 pedagogical practices, 93 Universal aspirations, xi, 4, 5, 7, 68 dimension, 67 hospitality (see Hospitality, universal) humanity (see Humanity, universal) rights, 11, 55 Universalism anti-, 69 configuration of, xii, 24, 42 cosmopolitan, xii, 19, 21, 25, 27, 42, 54, 58, 61, 64–67, 69 deliberative, 20, 65 dialogic, 66, 67 discursive, 22 form of, 48 Kantian, 31, 43 mistrust of, 69 moral, 31, 43, 54, 64, 65 objective, 18 University classroom, x, 125 context, 124, 127 course, 5 culture, 69 education, 82, 118 educators, 122–124, 136 environment, 127
INDEX
life, 74 pedagogical encounters, xi pedagogy, 73 routines, 62, 69, 73, 74 setup, 56 sphere, 77 students, 123–125, 128, 135 teachers, 114 Unjust causes, 79 crimes, 16 legacies, 50 outcomes, 59 practices, 87, 88 speech, xiii
157
V Values educational (see Educational, values) embedded, vi, 87 functional, 109 purposive, 109, 110 W Worldview, vi, 73, 87, 112, 116 X Xenophobia, 5, 12 xMOOCs, 123, 125