4 - Changing Cultures

Summary

Chapter 4 draws on a series of interrelated ideas including those of Emmanuel Levinas and phenomenological and Buddhist thought concerning ethics as a non-violent relation to the Other; a relation that is marked by one’s response to an other’s singularity. The aim is to outline a key element for creating institutional change that recognises this singularity, appreciating the complexity involved in living with others and the challenges this places on educational institutions. In particular, it argues that changes in educational institutions must encompass both the people who exist in them and the practices that constitute these spaces as institutions in the first place. In this light, while institutions are governed by rules, regulations, policies, legal frameworks and organisational structures, they institute themselves as institutions through cultures, which are composed of relationships, practices, experiences and shared imaginaries. These practices are not only cognitive or intellectual but also embodied, sensate and phenomenal. Thus in order for institutional change to have any real purchase, it is necessary that the transformation of cultures qua embodied practices, and the imaginaries that support them become the focus of our efforts, towards promoting new forms of relationality and new modes of sensibility in pluralistic contexts.