Adding Interest to Educational Practices. Propositions for a Post-Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to outline a way of theory development in educational thinking that stays true to the insights and commitments of post-critical pedagogy, while at the same time drawing out a slightly different pattern. The paper suggests five different propositions that reformulate the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy in a speculative-pragmatic mode, informed by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and Isabelle Stengers. Central to this way of doing theory is that it is situated by actual educational practices and that theory development itself is conceived as a way of taking care of our abstractions through the formation of concepts. What is at stake in this mode of doing theory is adding interest to educational practices, making them come to matter in a particular way. In doing so, post-critical pedagogy offers a way of analyzing educational practices of the present and the past, while opening up possibilities for designing educational practices for the future, without defining what the future might look like.