Abstract
This essay provokes who the “experts” are in discussions about education: why not the students who are most impacted by it? At the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), a joint centre between Uppsala University and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, students are hired as Course Coordinators (CCs) to develop and facilitate freestanding university courses. This paper is an outcome of a collaborative reflection exercise in the form of a written dialogue between students, CCs, and a guest lecturer of a CEMUS course “Reimagining Education”. This course focused on approaching learning and education on a meta-level where students and their experience become the subject of collaborative learning. By comparing the experience from this course with other courses at CEMUS and beyond, we discuss whether and how CEMUS challenges traditional pedagogies based on teacher-student hierarchies. Both the capacity for CCs to influence the content and pedagogical arrangements as well as the opportunities for non-CC students to take responsibility in steering class discussions were highlighted as empowering experiences. We reflect upon how this and the use of arts-based pedagogies can lead to fostering community and how it motivates students to collectively engage in their personal learning experiences beyond curriculum goals.
Highlights
To detangle from routes of reproduction and envision new paths where the foundation of what we have known to be true is questioned, we propose to examine the making of education in relation to the quest for sustainability
We explore Reimagining Education” (REDU) as an example of Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) education, but more than that, through our reflections on experiences and learning, we identify conditions and barriers for student-led education to be realized and for it to be fruitful in the greater context of the endeavour towards sustainability transformation
Even though the building of a strong community in the REDU classroom might have been just a by-product of its class size, we attempt to trace back how it evolved and why we argue for it to be relevant when debating the role of higher education in sustainability transformation
Summary
To detangle from routes of reproduction and envision new paths where the foundation of what we have known to be true is questioned, we propose to examine the making of education in relation to the quest for sustainability. Ewa: If the student experiences from different CEMUS courses are so different concerning what CEMUS is and what student-led education is about (or should be about), perhaps there has been a change from “the want for transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge” in the early ’90s when CEMUS started, to “explorative pathfinding for transformative action towards sustainability” in 2019 These reflections about who is the student in the “student-led” education point to a contradiction in the CEMUS education model, one relevant to any educational endeavour that seeks to foster “a better world.” Kumashiro (2000) highlights that any didactically induced perspectives, even those that profess themselves as critical (or transformative) pedagogy, are merely replacing existing power structures with new power structures, in this case embodied through the choices of CCs. If the CEMUS model puts the CCs in a privileged role, with the intention of breaking the teacher–student hierarchy, but with the unintended effect of reproducing power imbalances, can it do so in another way? Counter to the one-directional knowledge of large lectures in some other CEMUS courses, the dialogue-based small class and use of arts in REDU invited what Kumashiro (2000) calls “uncertainty,” to venture beyond what is known and planned by the students, teachers, and CCs
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