Participatory learning is inspired by its ability to stand out against
the built-in indifference to the other, primarily. It addresses
cultural deafness and the imposed silence and demotivations due
to social polarization or fragmentation – Pius V Thomas
Service learning and participatory learning are avant-garde conceptual duos in contemporary pedagogy. However, the concept of participatory learning claims that it is a new approach in service learning. It is generally understood as an approach to teaching and learning that focuses on the learner. PL encourages learning by doing, using small groups, concrete materials, open questioning, and peer teaching. The advantage of participatory learning is imagined to be being open to listening to one another and allowing others and oneself to speak. It is inspired by its ability to stand out against the built-in indifference to the other, primarily. It addresses cultural deafness and the imposed silence and demotivations due to social polarization or fragmentation. This demands a democratic disposition and courage to listen and share, to promote collaborative practices, and to offer paths that do not succumb to market pressure.
However, setting the broad horizon of understanding of true didactics, the critical pedagogues for a long time have been telling us that when we think of education in general and pedagogy in particular, there are two fundamental components. They are the dialogical flow of knowledge and the emancipatory potential of education. These components present before us a multifarious play of our concepts of knowledge, the creation of knowledge, and the social and political configurations of information flow. Therefore, the critical pedagogues seem to believe that the basic function of education, on the one hand, is to transform individuals constructively and make them change the community and the society, and on the other side, is to make knowledge democratically disseminated. Paulo Freire, one of the most original critical pedagogues of our times, in his The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, stresses dialogue and the human-world relationship as the purpose of education, as the essence of education is the practice of freedom as it is to initiate dialogue and search the human-world relationship. Education, Freire tells us, is a mutual, world-mediated process which helps people to become more fully human.
Many of them are of the view that education in the 21st century must put away some 20th-century thinking. All over the world today, many educators and policymakers believe that cooperation must displace competition as a primary form of relating. Competition is not to be abandoned—some competition is healthy and necessary—but it should no longer be the defining characteristic of relationships in an era of growing globalisation. Here, themes like ecological cosmopolitanism, educating the whole person, patriotism, race and multiculturalism, political education, etc., become the prime concern of education and democracy. This becomes more prominent as participatory learning looks more into the ethical interface of a meaningful pedagogy, as it demands the primacy of the ethical stance in learning and teaching.
One area in contemporary education that shuts its eye to the primacy of moral capability is the inescapable mastery ascribed to hyper ‘gadgetization’ in the name of ICT. Artificial intelligence and its multifarious growth become the main concern here. It is true in the case of both AI as machine learning, with its supportive tools like ChatGPT, and general AI that attempts to define the nature of intelligence or what constitutes intelligence. Along with ethical predicaments that AI generates in connection with human agency, we are also stuck at the very existential paradox that can machine learning and the general AI-induced brain ever achieve a one-to-one correspondence with the organic brain and its unending creative longing to self-transcend? When many AI enthusiasts see the future of AI with enormous modification of HI (Human Intelligence), many philosophers and ethicists point out that there are gross AI challenges, such as “commodification of learning, reduction of education to information transfer, replacement of human relationships with algorithmic interactions, and aggravation of inequalities between those with access to cutting-edge technologies and those without.” In an interesting write-up, ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent’, Meriam Nazih Alrashid shares with us that ethical leadership should make AI accountable to a governance framework that ensures active testing that fosters transparency. Similar fears are expressed by thinkers and scientists like Yuval Harari and Geoffrey Hinton, who is supposed to be the ‘Godfather of AI’, who said recently that the ethics-less astronomical investments by the tech giants may replace human labour with AI for profit.
It is in this historical juncture that participatory learning as service learning initiates an appropriate and responsible registry of the play between dialogue and democracy. Though it is a question that cannot be answered in simple terms, there are reasons to think that the solution lies ahead in the human presence in the role of teacher as an ethical leader and a public intellectual. The non-hierarchical journey from the learner to the teacher and back in order to serve and take up the agency helps the formation of meaningful community service with instruction and reflection. It allows students to connect their knowledge of real-world issues in order to foster civic responsibility, personal growth and rights awareness of both the self and the other. Though it may be viewed as an idealistic approach, there are good reasons to think that participatory learning as service learning can imagine deep democratisation of education, the learners and the educators. A democratic understanding of education as sharing of knowledge in a world of relatedness and relatedness of meaning in human interaction will also influence and mould ICT and AI as facilitators for enhancing the reach of relational authenticity and the critical and emancipatory intent of democratic teaching and learning and peaceful, just coexistence.
(Prof. Pius V. Thomas teaches at Assam University, Silchar. The above brief reflection is made in connection with an international conference on the Philosophy of Global Participatory Education the author attended recently in Rome and Germany.