Abstract
As an undergraduate student studying the global issues of poverty, development, human rights, and environment, I experienced contextual depression and hopelessness along with many of my peers, a trend that has only increased since then (Fritze, Blashki, Burke, & Wiseman, 2008). Now, as an educator, I’m deeply motivated to create transformative learning environments that invite the whole student and support them to engage the world with both critical and creative capacities. Preparing young people for complex, turbulent, uncertain futures is at the heart of Jennifer Gidley’s, Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures. We face multidimensional planetary crises she argues, that include environmental, psychological, social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions as well as an underlying crisis of thinking and meaning. The current educational model developed in the 19th century to support industrial societies is failing to educate in light of this interwoven complexity, not to mention woefully neglecting to address the psychological and social impacts of these crises on young people.
Postformal Education skillfully navigates the urgency and challenges embedded in these times, as well as the tremendous possibilities present within education, offering a vision for a new educational philosophy to awaken creativity, care, and agency. Based on a decade of research and four decades of professional and academic work in education, psychology, and futures studies, Postformal Education is a culmination of years of dedication to the topic of the evolution of consciousness in the context of education. Today, Gidley holds visiting academic posts in Australia and Europe and is the President of the World Futures Studies Federation (United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization and United Nations Partner), where she leads futures researchers, teachers, and professional practitioners from around 60 countries. Her other books on the topic include The University in Transformation (Ed.; 2000), Youth Futures (Ed.; 2002), and The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Written in a style that includes brief, yet meaningful personal narratives grounding the reader in the underlying motivations for the work, Gidley’s voice is both structured and emergent as she integrates the historical, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical dimensions of the inquiry. Gidley actively makes no apology for the densely theoretical nature of the discussions and importantly so, reminding the reader that there are “no shortcuts to evolving education” (p. 269). Ultimately, the purpose of the book is not for tinkering around the edges of a failing education system but to envision and enact radically new forms of education. The book provides a robust and substantive dialogue among leading thinkers and theories on cultural evolution, integral theories, developmental psychology, postformal reasoning qualities, postformal pedagogies, and educational futures, drawing upon Ken Wilber, Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Joe Kincheloe, Robert Kegan, Edgar Morin, and many others. While this book is not intended directly for the purpose of teacher education or education policy, the book will appeal to educational philosophers and researchers, educators and teachers, developmental and educational psychologists, educational administrators, and anyone else with interest in transformative educational theories designed for the 21st century.
Twelve chapters in total, the book is organized into three parts. Part 1 frames the discussion in the context of the evolution of consciousness, reviewing developmental psychology, and provides a background to the evolution of school education. Part 2 explores adult developmental psychology beyond Jean Piaget’s formal operations and discusses theories and practices of postformal education, engaging a dialogue among central thinkers and research. Part 3 delves into four pedagogical values drawn from the intersections of the literature that underlies Gidley’s postformal education philosophy, including love, life, wisdom, and voice, and provides initial examples of these values in education practice. Gidley argues that through the application and embodiment of these values we can facilitate a “healthy evolution of consciousness” (p. 9).
Pedagogical love is framed as responsible care, empathy, and reverence through transformative, integral pedagogies. The discussion ranges from how to be vigilant in protecting the personal boundaries and intimate spaces of youth while reinfusing the learning context with beauty and the importance of educators caring for themselves through contemplative and aesthetic cultivation.
Pedagogical life explores the significance of shifting mechanistic metaphors to life-sustaining metaphors drawn from the study of chaos, complexity, self-organization, and emergence, addressing a global culture that overall does not value life in its many dimensions. As Gidley writes, “we have altered the biosphere to the extent that our planetary homeland may in the foreseeable future become inhospitable for human habitation. How can children and young people be expected to contend with catastrophic futures?” (p. 208). Here, Gidley stresses the role of imagination as a way of creating links between sustainability, citizenship, and futures education.
With each pedagogical value building on the next, pedagogical wisdom outlines the need for the integration of intellect and heart—the need to both think deeply and feel intensely. Drawing on transdisciplinary theories, wisdom as defined here focuses on the complexity of knowledge rather than its fragmentation, and views wisdom as creative, complex, and intuitive, where education is designed to cultivate multiple intelligences and ways of knowing.
Finally, we arrive at the value of pedagogical voice. Gidley defines voice in the broadest sense—including the capacities for personal reflection, language reflexivity, and pluralism (which here connects to critical, postcolonial, and global education). This dimension focuses on enhancing awareness of one’s own voice, the dominant political voices shaping global narratives, as well as acknowledging and including the voices of marginalized cultures and subcultures.
This book joins the chorus of voices calling for a planet-wide call to action to transform education and makes a distinct, inspiring, and significant contribution in doing so. For some, the open-endedness of how postformal pedagogical values look in practice may be seen as a shortcoming of the book, one that Gidley acknowledges as beyond the scope of her endeavor. There are no formulas or teaching methods one can pull out and apply. What Gidley offers up is our shared responsibility in cocreating, imagining, and coevolving contemporary educational forms that will support young people in growing their bravery and inspiration in these turbulent times.