Pechtelidis, Giannis

Critiques of the dominant system expose how capitalism massively shapes our worldviews (De Lissovoy, 2022). This fundamental belief based on private perception, social antagonism and the anthropological type of “homo economicus” is extremely difficult to challenge: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" (Jameson and Žižek). What ways are there to experiment that can emphasize by contrast the anthropological type of “homo socialis”? As De Lissovoy, Pechtelidis and Kioupkiolis argue, a pedagogy of the commons can transfigure our perceptions in democratic directions (Pechtelidis and Kioupkiolis, 2020), making learning “a collective good, which is created, governed, and enjoyed in common by all parties of the educational community” (De Lissovoy, 2022); hence education can be a laboratory for new social imaginaries.
Education is a tool of experimentation of collaboration and social relationships towards regenerative practices. Reclaiming the enclosures of learning from state control and private property, commons delve into old and new approaches of social justice and democratic control. Ostrom’s work on natural commons (Ostrom, 1990) opened a third way of organizational practice beyond state and private control, and the myriad practitioners and researchers that followed have broadened the conception of commons beyond natural resources to culture, knowledge, the Internet and indeed any domain that might be reorganized on the basis of democratic management.
This presentation will consider the following key questions: If we perceive education as a field of struggle (Biesta, 2011), how can we reorganize education as an institution of the commons and reappropriate learning? How can the teacher be reshaped into a democratic facilitator and companion and what can we learn from the practices of the myriad commons-based initiatives of the physical and digital world that are currently being practiced across societies?