The Ivan Illich Learning Web

AERA Conference 2010, Call For Papers / Panels: Ivan Illich SIG (#161)

We invite papers related to how Illich might respond to this year’s AERA theme, Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World. From Illich’s perspective, the ideas of “ecosystem” and an “ecological worldview” were particularly seductive. While they appeared to represent part of a movement to protect life from industrial destructiveness, he ultimately suspected that “ecology” was part of a systematic movement to manage both nature and people’s lives in accordance with the abstractions of an administrative class of professional experts. For Illich, then, complex ecologies were undoubtedly changing the world but not necessarily for the better! Papers relevant to our SIG might then involve, though not be limited to, analyses and/or critiques of:

• The Manner in Which Curricula or School Systems Represent a Global Ecology of Education
• Education for Sustainable Development Policies and Practices as Representing or Intending Complex Ecological Outcomes
• Ecology, conceived as a Scientific Standard and New Knowledge Paradigm
• Media/Information Ecologies
• The Differences Between Political and Cultural Ecologies That Organize Nature as a Commons versus Nature as a Productive Resource
• Place-Based Forms of Education or Cultural Experience
• The Ways in Which Industrial Cultures Entail Different Life Expectations and Possibilities than Pre or Post-Industrial Cultures
• The Different Knowledge Ecologies Made Possible by Alternative Educational Institutions
• How Health, Medical, and Other Social Institutions Currently Produce an Ecology of Well-Being (or Unwell-Being)
• And, How Global Social Systems Frame, Integrate, or Otherwise Constrain Lived Experiences of the Local in Either a Contemporary or Historical Context

Please note: we are also happy to accept paper and panel proposals that extend beyond the scope of the specific call for papers issued here.

Important Announcements

* Call for Submissions will be posted on May 15, 2009
* Online Submission System will Open June 1, 2009
* Paper & Session Submissions: Deadline July 15, 2009

If you have any questions about a possible proposal for the Ivan Illich SIG, please feel free to contact our SIG Chair, Richard Kahn (rvkahn@gmail.com).

Ivan Illich SIG members are encouraged to support and work with Division B, Section 4 as we attempt to build community between the SIG and Section. Our SIG call for papers will be posted shortly, in the meantime, please take notice of the following call below and forward widely to any potentially interested parties…

Division B: Curriculum Studies

Division B invites proposals on curriculum studies broadly defined. Curriculum scholarship includes a wide range of inquiries from all kinds of methodological and philosophical perspectives conducted by people examining theory and practice, policy and development, enactment and evaluation. While submissions have traditionally focused on formal educational institutions at all levels and in a variety of settings, we strongly encourage submissions that transgress those boundaries and are focused on curriculum found in other parts of our lives and all over the world and submissions that center work for justice.  We particularly welcome proposals relevant to this conference’s theme: Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World. Both individual paper and session proposals will be reviewed anonymously, and, therefore, abstracts and summaries must not identify any participants by name.  For more information, please contact the appropriate section chair, or for general questions contact the program chairs: Therese Quinn, School of the Art institute of Chicago, tquinn@saic.edu and Erica Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University, E-Meiners@neiu.edu.

Division B, Section 4:  Ecological and Community Justice

“How do we know our place in the world?” Increasingly we live in a global age where notions of personal and collective identity are being mass produced through a hidden curriculum constituted internally and externally through forces of transnational capitalism, militarism and industrialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, speciesism, as well as other modes of oppression. We also participate in a variety of oppositional, alternative, and transformative movements such as traditional ecological knowledge, place-based education, and other means of enabling alternative social imaginaries and worldwide collectivities for planetarity. We thus invite papers that examine how groups inside and outside of educational institutions work against a complex array of threats to nature and culture and how they are producing diverse varieties of pedagogical struggle to reclaim, reinhabit, and revitalize the commons. We are interested in interdisciplinary perspectives that inform the possibility of achieving epistemological shifts in how we think about identity, community, and culture in relation to our places in the world and our ethical and political orientations to sustainability and social justice.

Section Co-Chairs:

Dolores Calderon (dolores.calderon@utah.edu),
Richard Kahn (richard.kahn@und.edu),
Marcia McKenzie (marcia.mckenzie@usask.ca)

Important Announcements

* Call for Submissions will be posted on May 15, 2009
* Online Submission System will Open June 1, 2009
* Paper & Session Submissions: Deadline July 15, 2009

In case anyone is interested, Ivan’s book ‘The Church, Change, and Development,’ from the 1960s, has been scanned and made available as a PDF, gratis. Here:

http://douloschristou.com/illich

And here, in a related blog, one can download a talk recently given recently by John McKnight, all about Ivan’s life and work:

http://erb.kingdomnow.org/?p=272

John W. Verity