Abstract
We live in a multidimensional pluralist world, where colonial, structuralist and industrial approaches of moulding a mind need to be questioned. Perhaps our modern educational system needs to forgo moulding a student and instead insist on developing the potential of a learner. India has long had the traditional approach of rearing a mind which is not bogged down by generalised standards. Despite this legacy, popularised design education here, is a borrowed version from ideologies of the West. The authors of this paper questioned their adopted roles as design facilitators, and conducted a social experiment to decentralise ownership of material and thought. Titled, ‘Power of space’, the experiment was an attempt at creating a series of unstructured dialogues hosted in spaces with apparent pluriverses. By shedding the rigid perception of their identities and merely being the catalyst for eliciting ideas, the scope for embracing vulnerability, humanising the interactions to being co-conspirators over administrators, and exploiting the ideas of de-tooling within educational experiences emerged. The paper collates the learnings and premise of the above experiment. Having met with multiple challenges, there were astute observations which were applicable at scale and could truly help decolonize the approach to the idea of educat-ing itself.
Keywords
Detooling; decolonise; co-conspirators; social experiment
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0008
Citation
Pasari, M.,and Joshi, P.(2021) Being Co-conspirators, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0008
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Being Co-conspirators
We live in a multidimensional pluralist world, where colonial, structuralist and industrial approaches of moulding a mind need to be questioned. Perhaps our modern educational system needs to forgo moulding a student and instead insist on developing the potential of a learner. India has long had the traditional approach of rearing a mind which is not bogged down by generalised standards. Despite this legacy, popularised design education here, is a borrowed version from ideologies of the West. The authors of this paper questioned their adopted roles as design facilitators, and conducted a social experiment to decentralise ownership of material and thought. Titled, ‘Power of space’, the experiment was an attempt at creating a series of unstructured dialogues hosted in spaces with apparent pluriverses. By shedding the rigid perception of their identities and merely being the catalyst for eliciting ideas, the scope for embracing vulnerability, humanising the interactions to being co-conspirators over administrators, and exploiting the ideas of de-tooling within educational experiences emerged. The paper collates the learnings and premise of the above experiment. Having met with multiple challenges, there were astute observations which were applicable at scale and could truly help decolonize the approach to the idea of educat-ing itself.