Concluding Notes: Towards an Activist Pedagogy

We would like to open these concluding notes with a look at the larger context in which we are working and within which this book was written. From our vantage point, activist pedagogy and shared education in divided societies is a topic that cannot stand meaningfully alone outside a concrete social context and historical moment. Any serious discussion let alone program suggested in this sphere of discourse must be attentive to what John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education:“thinking what the known demands of us”(1966, p. 326). In our case, engaged with the predicaments and challenges of humanity in the third decade of the 21st century, it means addressing the larger cultural context. It must attend to cultural trends that are inextricably bound together, including the risks to the young embedded in the destruction of the natural environment, the growing populism in our political democracies and the …