Imagining Education: Seeking New Metaphors For Schooling
Exploratory Seminar: Risk-taking Inquiry Into New Ideas About Education
Barcelona, October 23rd and 24th, 2014
Gaining access to education for all is one of the most important assets of democratic and fair societies. For a long time, state schools, the basic organisational metaphor of educational systems, have received a good deal of criticism, mostly due to neoliberal political interests as well as their difficulty of educating all children and responding to today’s educational challenges.
The structure (and the related machinery) created almost two hundred years ago has proven to be efficient in schooling most children, but is also emerging as a major obstacle to fostering genuine, self-regulated and student-centred learning, and seems to be failing to cope with the challenges and opportunities of the digital society. The need to deeply, openly and radically discuss these issues is based on our firm belief in the importance of education for all.
We would like to explore radical ideas, visions and scenarios about:
- how to organise educational systems to provide public, democratic, fair and quality education for all;
- how to maintain the current systems’ strengths, while trying to overcome most of its weaknesses;
- how to foster meaningful and responsible learning for all in the digital society.
We understand radical as relating to the basic or inherent constitution of a thing; favouring or tending to produce fundamental changes; and/or challenging the status quo.
More information on the seminar’s website
Edifici Llevant, Campus Mundet, Universitat de Barcelona, Passeig de la Vall d’Hebron, 171, Barcelona, Spain
