From Correspondence to Prefiguration: Mobilizing Learning Sciences for Alternative Social Futures

Abstract

In this paper, we propose that Learning Sciences has a specialpotential to contribute to the making of a collective future aimed atsocial cooperation and planetary flourishing, rather than goals ofunlimited economic growth and global competitiveness implicit in thediscipline’s inherited logics. To that end, we review studies oflearning in contexts of social movements and activist projects, anddiscuss the movements’ centering of prefiguration – thestrategy of building and enacting alternative sociopoliticalrelations and infrastructures in the here and now with afuture-oriented aim of dismantling and transforming oppressiveinstitutions. We propose that prefiguration can also serve asa generative orientation and design principle for Learning Sciencesand a prefigurative analysis of learning contexts can help toorient the contributions of the field towards more anti-oppressiveand consciously open-ended sociomaterial arrangements.