Future-Focused Education through Critical Appreciative Dialogue

As our world faces complex challenges and boundless opportunities at the same time, education plays a key role in the emergence of just and sustainable futures. This paper proposes Critical Appreciative Dialogue (CAD) as a basis for developing future focused pedagogical practices. In this paper, being “critical” means seeking to liberate life from its confinement by dominant power structures and to resist the epistemic violence that invalidates diverse ways of knowing and becoming. To be “appreciative” means to inquire into life’s survivability; to name its values, potentials, and demands. Being critical of the totalising effects of power and appreciative of the survivability of life, CAD presents future focused education as a decolonial and pluriversal dialogue. This paper is informed by more than ten years of research and teaching at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Western Australia. At the Centre, we invite individuals that have rich lived experiences and scholars from diverse cultural and religious worlds to engage in dialogue with our students. Taking classroom encounters as important opportunities for engaging in the everyday questions and challenges of existence, we identify key pedagogical lessons that could guide the future of education as an inclusive, reflexive, dynamic, and contextually relevant field that responds to the memories and aspirations of multiple cultural worlds as well as to the ethical demands of our time and the future. CAD is informed by these unique pedagogical encounters, as well as research from the Global South, Grassroots Movements, and Minoritized Communities.