Pedagogies of Coexistence toward a Regenerative Future

In this contribution I want to theoretically explore pedagogies of coexistence as a possibility to co-create life sustaining values toward a regenerative future. The aim is to recognize and re-envision strategies for education that encourage pluriversal and relational ways of knowing and being, and support the creation of a collective imagination of interdependence. I argue that polis as the ability to make collective decisions for the greater good needs to build on the interconnectedness of life. We are currently experiencing a crisis that is characterized, by the world-making practices of Western modernity that do not support life. One presumption is, that to realize a peaceful coexistence or polis means to transform the violences of modernity that encompasses a particular ontology and mode of being in the world. Global capitalism, neoliberalism and extractivism have granted themselves the right to assimilate all other worlds, building on a modern epistemology that is based on the separation between entities, between humans and nonhumans and between mind and body. In this worldview, the living become a machine, and understanding is achieved by division, separation, compartmentalisation, atomisation and reductionism. These epistemologies have heavily colonized our thinking and feeling as well as our educational systems (de la Cadena, 2015; Conway & Singh, 2011; Selby, 2002; Perry, 2020). How can we learn to acknowledge the world not as dead matter but an interdependent living universe in which we are involved, embedded and in interaction? (Akomolafe, 2020; Hart, 2014; Bozalek, Zembylas & Tronto, 2021). How is it possible that the world (Mitwelt) is perceived as our larger self, an ecological self to create responsible and caring actions? (Macy, 2020; Abram, 1996). These are questions that I would like to reflect in the context of polis.