This whole COVID-19 caper is a bit dogey I reckon. Whilst we are all locked away in our homes away from each other in our own private spaces we might seem to be disconnected and out of reach. Yet – Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is pulsing with ecstasy.
He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
Ironically Facoult’s Plague Town characterised the relationship between the self and the other-more-powerful-than-me. He picked up on the idea of the physicality of the lived urban space as taking on the role of the Panopticon’s tower.
We are being shown that we are knowing what we know now, that is, we’ve reacted to the plague in the way that we’ve always reacted to the plague (Albert Camus gives another great example). The plague uses information, in the hands of those positioned with more power such that their power increases at the expense of a largely self-regulating, self positioning populace giving up its agency to those with ever greater agency.
COVID clarifiers are all around us. The work of done by the ever present threat of ‘terrorism’ after 2001 has been eclipsed by the opportunity afforded by COVID-19. The result is the amplification of binary position taking by people at large and the power to position ‘others’ concentrated in fewer and fewer people / positions.
The point of this piece though is to look at how learners are positioned in their learning ecology such that they might acquire the power to shape their world.
In a recent chapter on Reimagining Education in a Pandemic: Children and Young People as Powerful Educations (not yet in print), the authors point to a couple of examples of children taking up positions for themselves. They were in fact, afforded these positions.
In the case of the Bushfire Manifesto, students make a claim that they should be listened to. Of note is the conclusion that says ‘… we can position CYP (children and young people) as experts… ‘ (emphasis my own).
This notion is at the heart of curating a learning ecology that reflects the values of a critical pedagogy of place. In the case of bushfire education, children are asking – ‘What happened here?’, all the way through to ‘What should happen here?’
So, will you position our kids as irrelevant novices unworthy of agentive engagement – or will you let them position you as an expert who can help apprentice them into skilful ways of being in the world. Or perhaps – there are many other positions to take up, to reject or be repositioned.