Narrative Patterns and Exformative Design in Cooperative Learning

Following up on the Brazilian educationist Paolo Freire’s call to liberate pedagogy from oppression (Freire, 1970), the present article proposes a new approach to the design and delivery of learning, no longer as an imposed curriculum of knowledge gathering and skills development, but as a systemic experience, lived in relationship with learning-nurturing communities. The “new normal of education” emerging from this exercise comprises strands of inspiration that reflect the broad interests and global lifestyle of the author—with elements from design theory and praxis, Japanese monasticism, Buddhist learning theory, cultural narratology, the post-romantic vision of Rabindranath Tagore, and much more. The educational design model appearing from the combination of these very different and culturally diverse elements is a hybrid, free-flowing framework ideally suited for systemic, organic, cooperative, and collaborative learning environments—challenging the systemic dualisms inherent in traditional teacher/student settings and other forms of societal and/or authoritative educational oppressions, of which Paolo Freire’s infamous “banking model” is only one

Absence, Ignorance, Presence (AIP) – An Exformative Approach to Confronting Legacies of Oppression in Education

Like when laying bare the root subsystem of a very old tree, for systems to be able to confront legacies of oppression in education, we must develop a grammar, a syntax and the appropriate semantics that permit the object matter of “confrontation” to be brought to the surface. To confront, in other words, is an activity of exhumation – and a confrontation is when we stand face to face (con + frons) with matter that was hitherto covered beyond a knowledge horizon separating the worlds of the knowable from the realms of the unknown. This workshop is an act of exformation – a concept that was first described as “information withheld,” (Nørretranders, 1998), later as “a communication method making things unknown” (Hara, 2015), and finally as “a process of learning by incrementally separating the knowable from the unknown” (Laleman, 2020). The workshop process aims at extracting the oppressive character of education from the unknown by creating an exformative space in which the activity of con+frons is embedded into the space by facilitated affordances. Like the seed of a tree has a relatively simple design that ultimately leads to possibly life-changing tree-dependent experiences, so do facilitated affordances require minimum design for maximum outcome. Through the process of exploring these facilitated affordances, quite counter-intuitively, the legacy of “oppression” in education is not just recognized in the space of dominance and subservience (both aspects of the “presence” of education) – but in different guises of “absence” or “assumed redundancy” of education too. AIP is a workshop on systemic discovery in space. Facilitation is gentle, almost oblique, and restricted to ad-hoc translation of group-emergent features into affordances. Participants explore and learn cooperatively – with, from and among each other. They work with objects and grids as temporary placeholders of ideas – and build mental models that provide for experiential revelation of facets of oppression in the realms of skills and knowledge “management.