Educating for Diversity When the Present Breaks In

Those of us who promote educational programmes aimed at fostering diversity know how complex they are. Broadening cultural repertoires, challenging prejudice or learning to live with difference are not immediate outcomes, but processes that, by their very nature, take time.

But these processes do not unfold in a world on pause. While we develop our educational projects, genocides take place, borders are tightened, and misogynistic and racist discourses grow stronger: realities that cause concrete harm, deepen inequalities and fuel processes of dehumanisation.

Rita Segato (2018) uses the term “pedagogies of cruelty” to describe social practices that, through repetition and habituation, teach us to see certain lives, bodies and territories as available, disposable or less worthy of care. We also learn from what a society tolerates, repeats and eventually incorporates into the landscape of everyday life. When violence, inequality or dehumanisation cease to unsettle us, they can come to seem normal, inevitable or distant. From this perspective, an important educational task is precisely to interrupt that habituation: to look again, to name and contextualise what we risk no longer questioning.

This idea is particularly relevant when we think about young people. They come to our programmes with forms of learning, references and ways of interpreting the world that we have not constructed ourselves: family, school, neighbourhood and digital media all play a role, transmitting narratives about masculinity, gender, grievance and belonging. While an educational project may have only a few hours, many of these forces operate every day. The challenge, then, is not simply for young people to know more about a world from which they already receive an enormous amount of information, often fragmented and emotionally intense, but to create spaces where they can interpret that information, question it and turn it into questions and critical tools.

This does not mean that every new conflict or crisis must automatically be brought into our workshops or educational programmes. Doing so mechanically would produce a pedagogy of current affairs, not necessarily a critical pedagogy. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2006) has drawn a useful distinction between “soft” and critical approaches to global citizenship education. The former may mobilise empathy, help and good intentions without sufficiently interrogating the historical and structural relations that produce inequality: an activity may address poverty, war or migration and still reinforce paternalism, simplification or the idea that some people must “save” others.

This is why introducing real-world problems is not enough. What matters is the position from which we interpret them. Critical and decolonial pedagogies offer some guidance here. Catherine Walsh (2013) has insisted on a pedagogy situated in the realities, histories, subjectivities and struggles of those who participate. Wilmer and Ernell Villa (2013), drawing on their work with Black communities in Colombia’s Caribbean region, speak of a “pedagogization of listening”: not simply creating space for people to speak, but learning to listen from within a context and recognising participants’ narratives as part of the construction of the pedagogical process. And going further back, Paulo Freire (1970) proposed identifying “generative themes”: meaningful issues that emerge from the ways people experience and interpret their reality and that can become objects of collective inquiry.

Perhaps we can think of programmes that are more permeable to context, capable of recognising when something that emerges becomes ethically and pedagogically significant: pausing, listening to it, asking where it comes from, relating it to broader structures and collectively deciding how to work with it.

In the arts, Adolfo Albán Achinte (2013, 2018) has written about “pedagogies of re-existence” to think through creative practices that do not merely represent the existing world, but make it possible to reclaim memories, contest forms of knowledge and produce other ways of narrating oneself and being in the world. Art contributes something specific here, not because it automatically produces empathy or transformation, but because it allows us to work through forms of displacement: representing a conflict, constructing a fiction, shifting a point of view, mapping a territory, intervening in an image, imagining other outcomes. This mediation can make it possible to address difficult questions without demanding confession or consensus.

Making space for what emerges does not mean treating all positions as equally legitimate. We can try to understand where a discourse comes from without turning racism, misogyny or dehumanisation into just another opinion within a debate. Such openness also requires us to ask how its costs are distributed: a controversy that, for some people, means intellectually exploring a position may mean, for others, having to listen while their dignity, rights or belonging are called into question. Creating space to discuss situations of vulnerability should not mean turning the experiences of those living through them into the pedagogical resource through which everyone else learns.

In previous reflections on PULSE-ART, we have emphasised that diversity cannot be reduced to celebrating difference, and that arts-and-education projects need to interrogate the power relations that run through languages, identities, forms of knowledge and possibilities for participation. The challenge that now emerges is somewhat different: how to keep this education connected to a present that changes faster than our programmes do.

Perhaps the task is not continually to add new topics to the curriculum, but to build spaces attentive enough to recognise when what is happening outside is already entering them: reshaping questions, fears, conflicts and ways of looking at others. An education connected to the present cannot resolve these realities, but it can help ensure that we do not accept them without questioning them.

Because the present, whether we like it or not, is already educating us.