Matt’s Notes
Kindest greetings, and welcome to Episode 17 of the EnT… wherein we go pretty deep on a topic Doug and I are increasingly interested in… namely… unlearning!
I’ll admit, Doug’s topic got to me this week! The “how tough across our lives?” part really jumped at me, especially during the recording…
Apologies for going into “Dear Diary” mode at some points in the recording… connecting unlearning to recent, lived personal experience has the potential to make you realize… there’s always more work to do! I’ll take that a step further and say that that notion of “always more to do” has been a guiding principle in my life for as long as I can remember… for better or for worse…
As always, I appreciate the opportunity to have these conversations with Doug… and with you! Whoever You are right now, we appreciate You!
Aw geez… what else? I’ve thoroughly enjoyed LA punk writer Jim Ruland’s recent books on SST Records… and Bad Religion… I have another of his on the way… co-writing Circle Jerks’ frontman Keith Morris’s biography… and furthermore I’ve had the Portable Henry Rollins arrive not that long ago… with Get in the Van on the way…
I’m trying to think of what else to fill this out? In my mind, I am flashing forward to later in the weekend… wherein we’re recording the Episode 4.0 of Today New Brunswick, Tomorrow the World… and I have some actual paid academic work that’s due “by Monday morning”… which is about all I feel like disclosing on that subject for right now! Further details as warranted…
Thanks for checking out the EnT, in whatever format! Please comment or email! We legit thrive on the contact…
Doug’s Notes
Unlearning – How tough is this across our lives?
The shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’, while it has served an important function in shifting the focus from the teacher to the learner, does not capture the fullness of the implications of this shift. We have been hearing about the importance of ‘lifelong learning’ for some time now in formal education. If, as Bauman asserts, ‘unlearning’ will be as important to social success in the 21st millennium as learning has been in the 20th millennium, then the habit of ‘lifelong learning’ will need radical re-thinking in terms of the nature and purposes of pedagogical work. Put simply, we will need to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and guide-on-the-side to meddler-in-the-middle.
McWilliam, E. (2008). Unlearning how to teach. Innovations in education and teaching international, 45(3), 263-269.
… this process involves both learning new knowledge, questions, and practices, and, at the same time, unlearning some long-held ideas, beliefs, and practices, which are often difficult to uproot.
Cochran-Smith, M. (2003). Learning and unlearning: The education of teacher educators. Teaching and teacher education, 19(1), 5-28.
In fact, to begin to make a case for unlearning is to reject the assumption that somehow, unlearning will become a new model for education.
Baldacchino, J. (2013). Willed forgetfulness: The arts, education and the case for unlearning. Studies in philosophy and education, 32, 415-430.
Unlearning calls on us to shake things up, to shake it off, to philosophize with a hammer, to take a leap of faith into the abyss of nonknowledge; it calls on us to let go, to fail, to fail again, for better or for worse. It calls on us to take the risk that encounters with learning ought also to be unacknowledged, unknowable, unassimilable. It calls on us to understand that what we call learning often does not have a why, a plan or an agenda, and essentially it calls on us to question why this is the case, or better, why this takes place.
Dunne, É., & Seery, A. (2016). The pedagogics of unlearning (p. 194). punctum books.
Word of the Podcast:
Unlearn
Question of the Podcast:
How do you make the decision to unlearn and change what you are doing?
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