Abstract
How can we help adult learners engage effectively with complex 21st century global challenges, while at the same time imagine alternative responses to them? Schwittay's text proposes a simple but powerful answer: by combining critique with creativity. Laying out a critical-creative pedagogy with four interwoven strands—whole person learning, creative methods, praxis, and critical hope—this book walks readers through how to combine critique and creativity in an accessible, engaging, personable, and intellectually stimulating manner. It provides theoretical foundations, practical tools, and rich examples of structural and institutional teaching and learning interventions for enacting alternative education futures.
The author shares her personal learning journey over the past decades, including her sense of letting students down when they leave class feeling disillusioned and demoralized while grappling with the grim realities of ongoing global poverty, inequity, violence, injustice, and failed development. Her self-reflexive awareness is itself a useful model. Schwittay's scholarship is well-supported and her arguments well-developed.
Chapter two, Remaking Academic Identities, challenges current neoliberalized university priorities such as increasing focus on student individual success factors and academic outcomes, corporatization, and managerialism. Rather than drive adult educators to despair, Schwittay offers hope, akin to Freire's radical hope (e.g., see Gannon, 2020; Melling and Pilkington, 2018) in the form of a call to decolonize universities through undoing western-centric assumptions about the way things operate, and increasing the role indigenous and other diverse socio-cultural knowledge and practices play within university systems. Chapter four, Reclaiming Economies, makes a compelling argument for exploring critical-creative pedagogical approaches to global economics. It shows how pluralist and heterodox teaching of economics focusing on alternatives and diverse economies encourages learners to open their minds to different ways of seeing. It includes post-colonial, feminist approaches to economics and Global South perspectives and invites learners to challenge dominant worldviews. Chapter five, Repairing ecologies, highlights the urgent need to re-address human-nature relationships within current sustainability agendas and by extension, within education. It underscores problematic aspects of human-centric approaches to sustainability, for example, overemphasis on green growth industries. Schwittay demonstrates how to shift focus in classrooms through learning from Indigenous ontologies which entail “radical interrelationships between humans and the natural world” such as Buen Vivir and complex systems thinking (2022, p. 114). Consequently, learners develop understandings of their interrelatedness and of the need to actively work to protect and care for nature beyond human consumption.
Creative universities is an invaluable adult education resource with a range of applications in varied fields, including, but not limited to international development, global studies, anthropology, sociology, human geography, and education. Schwittay offers a road map for creating change in universities. We agree with the author about creating openings for moving educators and learners beyond critique. We have some questions about how readers might apply this book in varied global contexts.
We are currently exploring how existing educators can embed Indigenous pedagogies and processes within western education systems (McKnight, 2016). Such work involves creating opportunities for learners to learn from (and in) nature, and not only to repair ecologies but to also be repaired by being-with ecologies. We wonder, what advice the book gives for re-designing curriculum and training educators in this kind of human-nature repair work? Perhaps this is beyond the scope of the book.
In our intercultural education work, we recognize a fundamental starting point for teaching critical creative pedagogy is learner self-examination of assumptions and biases. This takes time and assumes educators have time and adequate training in creating environments of solidarity and safety for self-reflection. Too often, remaking identity work such as the kind offered in this book, is sacrificed in already crowded curricula where pressures to quantify learner success discourage more reflective qualitative learning processes.
We are also curious about this book's application in diverse contexts around the world where higher education and adult learning is under-resourced and students are only taught orthodox economic theories. While Schwittay's book shows how a pluralist teaching of economics is possible, this may present as a seemingly insurmountable challenge in under-resourced university contexts where administrators and teachers are resistant to or unaware of pluralist theories.
Identified challenges and questions aside, Schwittay's book offers inspiration and hope to make radical changes in higher education.