This article is based on John’s contribution to a recent Globalization, Societies, and Education (2022) article on International Baccalaureate classroom pedagogy, co-authored with Dr Paul Tarc of the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
The International Baccalaureate Organization’s (IBO/IB) longstanding mission statement regarding internationalism and global progress, encapsulated in its brand promise of “A Better World,” provides a potentially solid framework within which to build such progressive international educational aspirations as planetary awareness, ethical social sensibilities, and committed civic engagement. It is with urgent regard for the IB’s progressive potentiality, perhaps kept latent for so long by the opportunistic political economic pitfalls of the contemporary world order, that this article series attempts to explore critical relationality and its supporting elements of serial uncertainty, process-before-product, democratic dialogue, and subject authenticity as possible “best principles and practices” for a progressive, social justice-oriented IB diploma program (IBDP) classroom. Critical relationality is at the heart of this series and includes the combined and integrated qualities of critical reflexivity (unpacking and troubling elements of unearned, asymmetric power and privilege) and relational responsiveness (supporting and fostering human connections which cultivate and demonstrate genuine self-regard within the context of the needs and rights of others). It is my belief that the conscious support of a critical relational classroom climate and culture provides optimal conditions for nourishing and growing a quality of progressive student and teacher learning that is emergent, open-ended, present-centered, need-based, self-constructing, inquiry-driven, and discovery-oriented. In short, classroom critical relationality adjudicates adequate space, time, and energy for the inherently unsettling, chaotic, unruly, and doubt-ridden nature of learning (serial uncertainty), while fully recognizing that even the most elegant learning objectives have little practical value, and even less purpose and meaning, if they aren’t anchored in classroom strategies “lit up” with active, even impassioned, exchange, engagement, commitment, inclusion, mutuality, and (soul) searching probing (process-before-product). Such dynamic classroom civic processes are best held court within the reaches of a ready acceptance and encouragement for responsible challenge, questioning, difference, dissatisfaction, and dissent (democratic dialogue). Finally, it is out of the foregoing dynamic classroom conditions and processes that authentic learning identities can develop (subject authenticity). That is, once the essential qualities of a critical relational IBDP classroom are set into motion, progressive “global citizen” subject formations emerge, and individual learning needs and inclinations are linked to and given “contextual relevance” within classroom critical, relational, and dialogic processes in ways that can promote the embedded, yet rarely realized, activist-oriented injunction of the IBO’s oft-touted “international mindedness” brand claim.
We will more fully examine and explore this proposed model of progressive international education and its related principles across the next five issues of this series. I conclude this opening article with a brief explanation of how, at the end of the day, the transformative effects of progressive critical relational pedagogy and its constituent principles must depend on a wishful but credible “article of faith” on the part of IBDP teachers and students.
Principle One: The Best Learning and Teaching Are Relational and Critically Reflective
My measure of value as an educator is relationality; my equally important measure of method is criticality. At its foundations, all learning begins, proceeds, and ends in relationships. Students make and maintain relations with each other, with the teacher, and with the knowledge offered via the curriculum. In both identity and expression, learning and knowledge are unabashedly intersubjective. Indeed, most human experience becomes apprehensible and sensical, needless to say communicable, only by way of its embeddedness in a social context comprised of a dynamic and shifting sea of interaction.
As such, the IB classroom setting I encounter daily involves a learning lifeworld of my students and myself that is always relational in nature. Ideally, a continuously open, honest, and vulnerable pedagogy best supports this relational embeddedness as prima facie. My students and I are enmeshed together in a social, relational process characterized by our responsiveness and accountability to each other’s learning and teaching needs in the here and now, with the clear hope that the more positive aspects and results of these interdependencies will spill over into the many worlds outside of school. It is this classroom/school-to-community bridge that best serves the interest of the international and planetary mindedness of the IBO. It is also this inter-mutuality that forms the basis for generating and rewarding ongoing exchanges involving shared reflections and critiques about the injustices in the world at large, as well as those in the classroom and in the school setting itself. Relationality is what is most needed to realize the international criticality we find implicit and embedded in the world citizen aspirations of the IB and to foster the sorts of planetary awareness and progressive social activism direly needed yet sorely lacking in most international schools today.
Principle Two: Uncertainty Is at the Heart of All Transformative Learning
As an IBDP educator, I can best make use of classroom critical relationality only after I have openly recognized its value and have permitted its graces. In order to do this, I must also allow the dynamic and emergent learning culture of my classroom to unfold and progress with an inherently unknowable, somewhat chaotic, and destabilizing reconfiguration of energies and involvements over time, often toward an uncertain and unpredictable arrival. Truth be told, human learning, whether alone, dyadic, or in groups is already exactly that, uncertain. And this uncertainty will invariably happen in the critical relational classroom, repeatedly. It is a serial, repeating condition of any genuinely transformative learning. The only certainty that can be expected (or requested) is found in those frames of academic content and graces of classroom civility that are needed for officiated learning to take place. These are the bare-bone necessities of any functional classroom at any given moment yet say very little about the needed growth of good people as students and teachers.
Principle Three: More Process, Less Product
The effective progressive IB classroom teacher must honor, to the fullest extent possible, the teaching/learning process over the performative product. This is not to say, of course, that the internal/external assessment culture of the IBDP, for example, should not be given its Caesar’s due. As indicated, it is my charge as a progressive IB educator to promote and even incite a class culture that openly and bravely explores and negotiates power dynamics, perhaps even acknowledges and learns from immediate distortions of power and privilege as microcosms of larger patterns, institutions, and symptoms. That being the case, then I must also be ready to navigate (I call it “surfing”) an always emergent, evolutionary, self-organizing set of interactive classroom energies which I fully expect are the most meaningful fuel available at any point in time toward higher and richer plateaus of critical relational-based learning. Provisional and transitional, yet potent, these evolutionary forces always call up generous doses of critical organic (spontaneous and appropriate) reasoning and self-organizing classroom social interaction and integration. At its best, a dynamic, open-ended classroom learning process, allowing the academic product or project to take shape later, represents an engaged, shared, meaningful understanding of the curricula material intimately wedded to present classroom needs and conditions. And yet pursued, at least partly, as an emergent and changing relational constellation of intersubjective learning and power relations, anchored to both the immediate situation and to the world.
Principle Four: Without Authenticity There Is Neither Relationship nor Criticality
In the critical-relational IB classroom, authenticity is an ongoing development best shouldered in equal parts by student and teacher. Its transactional currency is honesty, directness, transparency, and levels of self-control appropriate to the time, place, circumstances, and task at hand in the shared learning situation. It is anchored in the physical, cognitive, affective, and social presence and functioning of both the learner and the educator. When I “show up” as a reasonably transparent and authentic presence within the curricular frame of the moment, my students are invited to do the same. We then can have the quality of genuine relationships needed for criticality and learning. It is my conviction that classroom relational authenticity is a shared, if implicit, social contract. And, when allowed to circulate, it moves toward an ever-widening and deepening intensity of human intersubjectivity that fosters critical awareness of the uneven, diverse experiential, and inequitable life conditions of proximal and more distant others in our life. This awareness is an essential ingredient for (in)forming freely chosen social activism within a planetary frame of meaning, exactly the sort of outcome gestured at by the IBO meme of “international mindedness” and recognized by progressive educators worldwide.
Principle Five: Democratic Dialogue Is the Heartbeat of Critical Relationality
Every classroom I’ve ever been part of was in some ways (often in many) a sociopolitical, economic, oft cultural, microcosm of the larger society and the world. This is to say even the most homogenous class of students in the most purportedly socioeconomic-leveled location on the planet will still generate social fields and status differentials that mirror shadings of power, privilege, difference, and convergence outside the schoolyard. As such, progressive IB classrooms can by nature and should by design support relatively open, civil, judicious, solution-oriented, democratic dialogue and decision-making in ways that move toward resolving individual misgivings, unearned privilege and power, and interpersonal and intergroup tensions and inequalities. Democratically conducted dialogue in a spirit of critical reflection and emerging relationality fosters a quality interrogation of one’s own positionality, and the effects of differential power, privilege, and status on one’s learning and life experience. If not a formal component of the course curriculum, then democratic dialogue certainly should be recognized as an essential measurable characteristic of the basic, adept civil citizenry necessary to bring to life the other principles of critical relationality in the IB classroom in perfect alignment with the IBO’s canopy of international mindedness and better worldism.
Conclusion: Critical-Relational Learning as an Article of Faith
Critical-relational learning is first and always about forging quality intersubjective connections, even where those connections are fraught with tension, uncertainty, and challenge. Moreover, because of the high regard in this exploratory/experiential model for student agency and the (believed) present-centered generativity of emergent student needs and choices, there is no guarantee that socially transformative or progressive learner subject positions will invariably take hold and emerge. Certainly, there is much less control over “student outcomes” than that found in more conventional classroom teaching and management strategies (intentionally so). Indeed, it is an “article of faith” to believe that progressive social and political outcomes must or will result from critical-relational IB classroom approaches that support teacher-learner intersubjective responsiveness and civic engagement. It is my belief that like all models or sets of principles that claim to be transformative in education, critical-relational learning and teaching have their own native article of faith. That claim to faith reads something like this:
Any time that student and teacher-learners are brought together with the explicit intent of being more reflective of self and others, more honest and authentic in their classroom interactions, more accepting of processes and periods of uncertainty, more inclusive of the range of voices and opinions present, more reluctant to accept unearned privilege and power as a natural given, and more aware of the unprecedented ills of the world and the invaluable role each can play to help cure those ills, all of which take place by design with and through the learning of valuable required IB academic content, then we can rest fairly well convinced that once all those “necessary” conditions are met for growing the good people we so direly need for a world in trouble, they will likely, almost certainly, prove “sufficient” conditions as well.
References
Lyons, John (2020) Globalization and the Neo Liberal Schoolhouse: Education in a World of Trouble. Brill Pub, Boston / Amsterdam.
--------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Lyons is a career IB diploma program educator who has taught in more than a dozen international schools on five continents. He is also a published nonfiction author, poet, and intercultural human service counselor/consultant.
Website: [email protected].
