Shakin’ the Classroom

Dominant university education excludes not only multiple actors, contents and contexts from the knowledge making, but also multiple ways of knowing and learning. Who knows, what can be known, as well as how things can be known is often limited to modern disciplinary scientific inquiry that presents itself as the only legitimate mode of knowing.

Teaching and learning focus mostly on cerebral capacities, favour classrooms to other learning settings, support hierarchical relations between teachers and learners, commodify knowledge that is being shared and acquired, and foster individualism and self-centredness of learners. This holds true for culture and media studies in general, and cultural management programmes in particular, with its heavy reliance on exclusively Western and Anglo-Saxon literature, management theories and understandings of culture, organizations and development. Cumulatively these limitations of the mainstream teaching practices narrow the scope of knowledge, skills and competences that learners (and teachers) can adopt during a learning process. In such arrangements, subaltern experiences, knowledges and ways of learning, are seen not only as illegitimate, but also as irrelevant.

This is why SHAKIN’ project, has collectively developed an online toolbox Shakin’ the Classroom, in both symbolic and material sense. The toolbox brings together non-hegemonic methods, tools and ways of knowledge-sharing hoping to make room for more plural and sensitive teaching environments in culture and media. It is intended for learners and teaching staff working at culture management and media programmes across Europe, as well as for organisations in culture and media whose work focuses on some forms of knowledge sharing. The toolbox is international and open access, created through collaboration of not only project partners but numerous other contributors.

The whole toolbox is imagined as an antithesis to hegemonic ways of knowledge sharing at universities, which are individualistic, commodifying, universalizing, too focused on logic and reasoning, abstract, productivist and excluding. That is why methods and tools gathered focus on collective endeavours, collaboration and co-learning; on non-hierarchical ways of knowledge-sharing ; on making knowledge common; on contextual, location-based, in situ processes and knowledge; on corporeal and sensory learning ; on playful, ludic as well as poetic elements of sharing knowledge ; on experience based and processual aspects; as well as on self-othering in order not to exclude others. By diversifying not only the usual sources of knowledge, but also ways of learning and creating knowledge and skills, this toolbox contributes to redefining the usual ways and relationships in the process of knowledge production in the classroom.