DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES AS LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities Edited by Ruud van der Veen Teachers College, Columbia University, USA Danny Wildemeersch University of Leuven, Belgium Janet Youngblood Teachers College, Columbia University, USA and Victoria Marsick Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-8790-129-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-8790-130-1 (hardback)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com

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All rights reserved © 2007 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

CONTENTS

Foreword Jack Mezirow

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1. Introduction The Editors

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PART I DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES, LEARNING AND EDUCATION 2. Foundations of democratic education: Kant, Dewey, and Arendt Gert Biesta 3. Relocating social learning as a democratic practice Danny Wildemeersch & Joke Vandenabeele

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19

4. A model for the support of active citizens: Based on Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality Ruud van der Veen

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5. The adult educator as a boundary worker: Citizen learning in policy participation Joke Vandenabeele

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6. Democracy and representation in the US Janet W. Youngblood

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PART II POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ACTION 7. Learning opportunities for active members of nonprofit organizations in Japan Kazuho Tsuchiya

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73

CONTENTS

8. Who learns what in participatory democracy? Participatory budgeting in Rosario, Argentina Josh Lerner & Daniel Schugurensky

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9. Developing a citizen education program for Pakistan: Drawing on progressive interpretations of concepts in the Islamic tradition Bernadette L. Dean

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10. The struggle for a new collective and democratic identity in post-communist Europe Agnieszka Bron

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11. Learning opportunities in community services in Flanders Carmen Mathijssen & Danny Wildemeersch 12. Precarious public interventions: Community development, civil society and the state in the Netherlands Marcel Spierts

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PART III DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES ON THE SHOP FLOOR 13. Learning to organize: The challenge and promise of democratic learning in American unions Ellen Scully-Russ

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14. Dealing with difference on the shop floor: Learning between ‘reflective practice’ and ‘mild indifference’ Nathalie Schippers & Danny Wildemeersch

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15. Participation and expression: Democratic practices in a Sierra Leone tile company Julia Sloan

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About the authors

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Index

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FOREWORD

The publication of Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities evolved out of selected contributions to the first of a series of international seminars, in different parts of the world, on this subject. The first seminar was sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, where John Dewey authored his definitive Democracy and Education in l916. He called for extracting truth from existing forms of community life and employing it to criticize undesirable features and to suggest improvement − looking for interest held in common and interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. It is from these two considerations that he derived a standard for democratic life. Dewey recognized that democracy depends upon more varied points of shared common interests and recognition of mutual interests as keys to social control. Democracy required free interaction between social groups and change in social habit − continuous readjustment in meeting new situations produced by varied discourse. Democracy is to be understood as primarily a form of associated living − of conjoint communicated experience. The major emphasis is to bind people together in cooperative human pursuits. Education must encourage fuller, freer, more fruitful association and be instilled as a disposition of mind. The concept of transformative learning, which I first introduced in a research study, Education for Transformation, published by the Center for Adult Education at Teachers College in l978 has been recognized by adult educators quickly as a relevant concept to understand democratic practices as learning opportunities, in particular as an opportunity for learning to recognize, understand and act upon taken-for-granted assumptions supporting our beliefs, values and preferences

Jack Mezirow Emeritus Professor of Adult & Continuing Education Teachers College, Columbia University

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1. INTRODUCTION

Education and learning for democracy take place in a wide variety of contexts worldwide. Traditionally, children are prepared to become responsible citizens in families and schools. They learn about rights and duties related to citizenship. Increasingly they have the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes concerning issues that matter to them. In non-formal settings and in their lived experience, people are invited to participate in democratic practices. Some people are active members of political parties and trade unions; others take responsibilities in associations of civil society. Still others engage in participatory practices in labor organizations. In line with this, the concept of learning for democracy is widened and deepened. It is widened because it transgresses the boundaries of formal education and opens perspectives for learning for democracy in non-formal contexts. It is deepened because it includes various forms of learning such as experiential learning, social learning, participatory learning, and transformative learning. New practices and understandings of learning for democracy are often attempts to deal with transformations taking place in the contexts in which people operate. These transformations are not necessarily favorable to the learning of democracy. In the USA, political parties engage increasingly in large- scale media campaigns and tend to neglect the necessary grassroots dynamics. The workplace is often confronted with opposite tendencies between horizontal and top-down decisionmaking. Experiences in Eastern Europe show how hard it is to move from a totalitarian regime towards a democratic regime. Fundamentalist answers to the insecurities of present-day life in a globalized world reinforce undemocratic tendencies. On the other hand, members of civil society associations, enlightened decisionmakers, or committed educators, develop interesting experiments to renew democratic practices in view of the new demands of citizens, workers, corporations, and state institutions. They experience the limits of representative democracy and try to enrich it with practices of direct democracy, thereby creating new learning opportunities for the participants involved. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH NETWORK

In 2005, Victoria Marsick in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College and Janet Youngblood, her student, organized a conference around research in learning in the practice of democracy. With the assistance of Ruud van der Veen, at Teachers College, Columbia University and Danny Wildemeersch from the University of Leuven, Belgium keynote speakers were

R. van der Veen et al. (eds.), Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities, 1–4. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

invited to address the topic of the Conference, “Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities” and a call for papers was issued. The material in this volume represents the work of this first conference. From this conference an international research network has developed. The work is highly interdisciplinary representing adult learning and leadership, adult education, political science and sociology to reflect on questions formulated from the first conference such as: – What does successful democratic practice look like in different contexts worldwide? – What is the learning potential of established practices of democratic participation in the region? – What is the learning potential of “emergent” practices of democratic participation? – What are the limitations of social (collective) learning related to democratic practices? – What contexts appear to limit the learning for democracy? – What are the main differences between formal and non-formal education in view of learning for democracy? To further exploration of these topics, Danny Wildemeersch and Joke Vandenabeele at the Departments of Social Pedagogy at the Leuven University, founded the interdisciplinary and international research community “Diversity and plurality in the urban context” for the continuation of the study of democratic practices as learning opportunities in urban environments. Among other activities, with financial help of the Flemish Community the research community will organize five international seminars at different places in the world to foster faceto-face contacts between scholars and to deliver publications on questions as formulated above during the period 2007-2009. While this community will focus primarily on democratic practices related to questions of diversity in the urban context, more projects will be initiated to cover other aspects of our general mission to stimulate interdisciplinary scholarly work on democratic practices and adult learning. CONTENT OF THE BOOK

The book presents both papers that explore theoretical aspects of learning in democratic practices (Part I) and papers that describe examples of learning in democratic practices in different contexts and different parts of the world. The papers on examples of learning in democratic practices have been divided in two parts. Part II of the book describes examples of learning in political and social action, while Part III describes examples of democratic practices on the shop floor. Together the book delivers an introduction to the field, which can be used also as a textbook in graduate and post-graduate courses. Below follows a short description of each chapter. There is a long tradition in social sciences that focuses on issues of democracy, participation and social inclusion. Contributions came from disciplines such as philosophy, political science, sociology, and education. Chapter 2 (Biesta) condenses this history in a comparison of three key theorists: Kant, Dewey, and 2

INTRODUCTION

Arendt. Chapter 3 (Wildemeersch & Vandenabeele) describes the recent history. Particularly they confront the emancipatory perspectives of the seventies and eighties of the last century, Habermas and Freire, with the later post-modern and post-structural critiques on these modernist perspectives. Chapter 4 (Van der Veen) returns to Habermas as a still viable model for education and learning through political and social action. While in chapter 5, (Vandenabeele) presents a critical pedagogical perspective, by applying the concept of “deliberative practices” in an analysis of environmental education. In Chapter 6 (Youngblood) discusses issues of learning in unitary and adversarial representative contexts and the quality of representation in the United States context. Part II of the book makes the shift from theory to practice. It presents an analysis of learning in political and social action in a rich variety of contexts (Japan, Argentina, Pakistan, post-communist Europe, and Western Europe). At the same time it describes different types of democratic practices and the learning opportunities it creates for citizens. Chapter 7 (Tsuchiya) describes the recent growth of nonprofit organizations in metropolitan Japan. The chapter analyzes how active members of these newly founded organizations learn, often in dialogue with Japanese history, to apply democratic values in an effective way. Chapter 8 (Lerner & Schugurensky) describe participatory budgeting, an innovative democratic practice in hundreds of cities in Latin America. Through their case study in Rosario, Argentina they demonstrate that such participatory processes are indeed a “school of citizenship”, that creates citizens who are more knowledgeable, skilled, democratic, engaged, tolerant and caring. Chapter 9 (Dean) describes Pakistan’s struggle to develop a progressive, moderate and democratic society that is not just a copy of Western democratic forms but, at the contrary, is based op progressive Islamic values. She sketches the key concepts and values of Islam, its history and traditions, that do provide the bases for establishing such a democracy and how a citizen education program in Pakistan could foster that. Chapter 10 (Bron) describes the situation in Eastern Europe. The author describes in detail the struggle of post-communist governments to create a new collective and democratic identity and the role that citizen education has to play in that process. Finally chapter 11 (Mathijssen & Wildemeersch) and 12 (Spierts) analyzes cases in Western Europe that strive for a stronger participatory democracy in the local community. Chapter 11 describes the case of community services in Belgium, an emergent practice of activation of the long-term unemployed, which leads to interesting new forms of social economy. Chapter 12 analyzes the role of community development in the Netherlands from the perspective that local communities now are more diverse and that a common interest of all citizens can not be assumed at forehand, which leads consequently to the central question how community workers can deal with different positions and confrontations in the public domain. Contrary to the traditional tendency to limit the concept of democratic practices to the public domain, we have seen in the last decades a trend to create democracy practices at the shop floor. In Part III we present three typical examples of such a development and the learning opportunities it creates for workers. Although 3

INTRODUCTION

chapter 13 (Scully-Ross) deals with the oldest form, the unionization of workers, its focus is mainly in how unions in the US change nowadays and what role vocational education strategies play in that process. Chapter 14 (Schippers & Wildemeersch) starts from the notion that the (future) workplace will be an ethnic and culturally diverse workplace. The chapter confronts the diversity literature with empirical research by the authors in how workers deal in fact with the multicultural reality on the shop floor. They found that dominant theories such as transformative learning, as a transformation of taken-for-granted assumptions, do not fit very well with that reality. The last chapter, Chapter 15 (Sloan) describes a deliberate attempt to introduce two democratic principles, participation, and expression, as a strategy to improve the management of a tile company in Africa. The case supports a broader thesis that democratic practices also can lead to an increased effectiveness, both in society and in business. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As the editors of this book, we really want to thank the authors first, not only for their interesting contributions to this book, but also for their exemplary compliance to the deadlines for the production of the book. Of course as editors, we have commented on the drafts for chapters, but we have also invited for each chapter an expert on the topic of that chapter to review the text. The reviewers were, in alphabetical order, Rik van Berkel, Jeanne Bitterman, René Bouwen, Joseph Catania, Patricia Cranton, Paul Dekker, John Field, Amita Gupta, Jane Judd, Jane Mansbridge, Jan Masschelein, Lambert Mulder, Edward Oyugu, Ching Lin Pang, Piotr Sztompka, Alistair Ross, and Maarten Simons. We want to thank these reviewers for their enormous important contribution to the quality of this book. Finally, we want to thank our co-editor Janet Youngblood, Teachers College/Columbia University for the final editing of the complete text, Marc Vlecken, University of Leuven for the lay-out of the text and Peter de Liefde from SensePublishers for his trust in and efficient support of our work.

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PART I

DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES, LEARNING AND EDUCATION

GERT BIESTA

2. FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRATIC

EDUCATION: KANT, DEWEY, AND ARENDT INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

Ever since its inception in the polis of Athens, political and educational thinkers alike have asked questions about the kind of education that would best prepare the people (demos) for their participation in the ruling (kratein) of their society. Although our complex global world bears little or no resemblance to the city-state of Athens, the question of the relationship between education and democracy is as important and urgent today as it was then. However, how should we understand the relationship between democracy and education? In this chapter, I will argue that an answer to this question crucially depends upon our views about the democratic person. Stated in terms that are more philosophical: it depends upon our ideas about the kind of subjectivity that is considered desirable or even necessary for a democratic society. One influential line of thinking holds that democracy needs rational individuals who are capable of their own free and independent judgments. This idea, which was first formulated by Enlightenment philosophers more than two centuries ago, has remained influential up to the present day, both amongst political theorists and educators (see, for example, Dryzek 2000; Gutman 1987; Habermas 1996; Rawls 1993; 1997). Whereas some might argue that this is all there is to say about the characteristics and qualities of the democratic person, I intend to show in this chapter that there are distinctly different answers to the question as to what it means to be a democratic person. Moreover, such answers entail different views about the learning processes involved in being/becoming a democratic person. This, in turn, has important implications for how we approach democratic education. In this chapter, I present three different views of the democratic person to which I will refer an individualistic, a social, and a political conception of the democratic person respectively.1 The philosophical roots for these conceptions can be found in the work of Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt respectively. Although their views do not in all cases directly outline conceptions of democratic subjectivity, I will argue in this chapter that their understandings of what it means to be a subject have important implications for how we understand the democratic person. In turn, this has implications for how we understand democratic learning and democratic education. The purpose of this chapter is primarily to show that there are different ways to understand what it means to be (come) a democratic person. In the concluding section I will make clear, however, why I think that an approach based on Arendt’s ideas is the most fruitful one, from both a political and an educational point of view. R. van der Veen et al. (eds.), Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities, 7–17. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.