Conference Agenda

The current crisis of the research regarding teachers’ views about inclusive education consists of tension between two problematic camps. On the one hand, the first camp, which can be defined as the psychological school, examines teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge roots from an inherently individualistic and reductionist perspective to determine whether teachers reject or adopt the idea of inclusive education. The second camp, which can be called structuralist tradition, on the other hand, focuses on socio-cultural barriers teachers face when they intend to become active agents for promoting inclusive education.

Even if these two camps seem opposite perspectives, they still fall into the same pitfall by overlooking their hidden assumptions about teacher agency. The former camp looks for the explanation for the failure of THE inclusive education project in the gap between teachers’ beliefs and actions, serving the responsibilisation mechanisms of neoliberalism (Done & Murphy, 2018). Similarly, the structuralist camp- ignores the teacher agency’s transformative capacity and power to change the status quo.

Current explanations point out that neoliberalism has a discursive capacity to demarcate the fields of validity, normativity, and actuality within a particular economic rationality (Grimaldi, 2012). In the education field, we can observe this through either human actions or the products designated to guide these actions, such as policy texts or curricula. However, this does not necessarily mean that all actions are determined by the coercive power of a neoliberal discourse since there would otherwise be little or no autonomy for the agency. Instead, the status of teacher agency remains preserved by conceptualising the neoliberal discourse as a mechanism that imposes limits on what we can say.

The way of dealing with the impact of competitive economic rationale of neoliberalism on education, we need research that presupposes that there is room for a change and a role for teacher agency in making inclusion replace the current dominant educational discourses. From this point forth, this research project formulises its research question as follows; to what extent and in what ways are teachers’ views and actions of inclusive education informed by neo-liberalisation discourses in Scotland?

The concept “diversity” is being used more frequently in today’s globalized world, where cross-cultural communications and interactions have risen. As for higher education, which according to Brubacher (1987) is the engine for the growth of contemporary society, the spirit of diversity is vital for its development in all of its facets, including the improvement and practice of teaching methods, the dissemination and innovation of knowledge, the discovery and cultivation of talent, the renewal of technology and the transmission of civilization, etc. This study intends to examine and analyze the effects of diversity on higher education by looking back to the Jixia Academy in China during the Axial Age (Jaspers, 1949).

The term Axial Age is mentioned in the book The Origin and Goal of History published in 1949, written by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. He thinks that the “axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C.” During this era, both the West and China produced many great philosophers and educators, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as well as Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi. It was also during the Axial period that the prototypes of higher education emerged in both West and East : the Platonic Academy in ancient Greece and Jixia Academy in China.

Jixia Academy is recognized as a prominent institution of higher education in China during the Spring and Autumn era. It was founded during the reign of Tian Wu, the Duke Huan of the Qi State (374-357 B.C.). Jixia was a place where various schools of thought flourished, where many talents nurtured and where excellent teachers were gathered. The masters of Jixia produced works and taught their doctrines, in which we find the sources of almost all Chinese philosophical ideas, such as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, the Yin-Yang school, the Huang-Lao school, etc. Moreover, the scene of ‘hundred schools of thought’ unfolded in Jixia Academy precisely because of the value of diversity, liberty and equality it maintained.

This Ancient Academy came to an end after the defeat of the Qi state against the Qin State in 221 BC. Nevertheless, it had a spectacular existence for more than 150 years. It not only made a significant contribution to the academic and educational research work of the Qi State, but also had a great influence and effect on kingdoms at that time and later generations. In 1982, a national symposium on Jixia Studies was held in Zibo, the former site of this Academy, and the study of Jixia became widespread. After 5 years of archaeological work, the existence of Jixia was officially confirmed at the beginning of 2022. Apart from the historical documents, this discovery objectively proves its glory of the time.

Bai Xi (1989) believes that the success of Jixia Academy lies first and foremost in its spirit of diversity. Indeed, diversity is a powerful agent of change and an imperative that must be embraced if universities are to succeed in a pluralistic and interconnected world (Daryl, 2020). Therefore, how does Jixia Academy embody the spirit of diversity? If we concur that “until today mankind has lived by what happened during the Axial Period, by what was thought and created during that period” and that "the conception of the Axial Period furnishes the questions and standards with which to approach all preceding and subsequent developments” (Jaspers, 1949), then what remains of the Jixia Academy of the Axial Age for us? This research focuses on the effects of Jixia mainly in terms of the diversity of teaching methods and educators (schools of thought).

This doctoral study develops as the diagnostic phase of a fourth-generation formative intervention seeking to understand and catalyse the learning processes at the core of eco-social mobilisations triggered by collective challenges (Heidemann, 2019; Kuk, Tarlau, 2020; Engeström, Sannino 2021). Ever more local communities across Europe strive to resist the existential risks posed by climate change, globalisation, and pandemics by engaging in transformative activities aimed at envisioning alternative futures (Gümüsay, Reinecke, 2022). Plagued by intensifying floods, relentless overtourism, and rampant depopulation, the urban lagoon of Venice has notoriously become one of the most endangered European sites (Pascolo, 2020: 17-26). Therefore, the current research focuses on the critical case of the Venetian civil society, which is struggling to reclaim the vanishing future of its city suffering from an organic crisis akin to those experienced along the Northern Mediterranean region (Dlabaja 2021). Venice’s civil society organisations (CSOs) seem unwilling to surrender to the chronicle of a death foretold: they have recently tried to mobilise together by breaking the historical tensions between environmentalist groups, neighbourhood associations, and trade unions (Chiarin, 2022).

The general research question orienting the fourth-generation formative intervention captures the above problem statement:

How can the Venetian community learn to collectively enact its desirable futures?

Nonetheless, this preliminary stage focuses on diagnosing the conditions, or the lack thereof, for expanding the transformative activities of Venetian CSOs into heterogeneous coalitions seeking to regenerate the futures of the urban lagoon.

In view of its enduring environmental, residential, and economic crises, the diagnostic research questions guiding the present study are as follows:

1) How have Venetian CSOs learnt to coalesce into mobilisation networks dealing with these critical challenges?

2) Have mobilisation networks enacted collective transformative agency (TADS) by producing mediating artefacts sustaining their future-making activities?

3) Which major congruencies and contradictions have emerged between mobilisation networks and multi-level activity systems seeking to shape the futures of Venice?

The corresponding research objectives consist of a) the reconstruction of long-lasting learning processes enabling Venetian CSOs to mobilise more or less effectively; b) the identification of primary, secondary, or tertiary artefacts enabling coalescing CSOs to enact collective TADS; c) the hypothesis of congruencies and contradictions constituting the relationships between Venice’s civil society and its public bodies, educational establishments, and labour market. Besides this practical impact at the community level, the project aims to contribute to the emerging fourth generation of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, first, by conducting and documenting a systematic diagnosis preparatory to multiple Change Laboratories (Sannino, 2022).

Hyperobjects such as climate change, globalisation, and pandemics affect cross-sectoral activities, which in turn call for eco-social transformations of communities and their institutions (Hasse, 2019). The formation of cross-scale coalitions coordinating various actors at local, national, and global levels capable of responding to these challenges becomes both the qualitatively new unit of analysis and intervention goal of 4G Activity Theory. Thus, the diagnostic work must focus on the potential developments of activities across sectoral and hierarchical boundaries by examining the history and configuration of the field (Antti, 2019). For the Venetian case, this entails mapping:

• The timelines of mobilisation and institutional activities responding to the organic crisis of the urban lagoon;
• Their major transformations due to novel mediating artefacts (Venice’s special laws, mobilisation strategies, etc.);
• The germ cells of coalescing mechanisms involving multi-level actors in cross-sectoral campaigns for the city’s infrastructure, sustainability, and degrowth.

Such 4G diagnosis lays the foundation for the operational phases of multiple Change Labs meant to enact the future-making coalition through cross-scale expansive learning cycles.