Daniel Bryan says his lectures about the Pachaysana Institute are not supposed to feel like normal lectures. They’re meant to be odd, goofy, and unfamiliar—a tone he replicated when he spoke at the Shapiro Campus Center on Monday in a talk titled “From University to Pluriversity: The Fair-Trade/Decolonial Education Model.”
The Pachaysana Institute is based in Quito, Ecuador. Its goal is to remove colonial influence from education by offering study abroad curriculums that follow local values and practices rather than traditional European norms. The Institute also offers training seminars to educators across all cultures, and a variety of other short term projects, according to Bryan.
The audience consisted of 10 members, with both students and faculty present. While explaining the organization, Bryan asked for audience participation often. He introduced the topic with a joke about Aristotle, Plato and Descartes, and asked for anyone to raise their hand and guess how the joke might connect to decolonizing education. The audience was hesitant during this initial request, but by the end of the presentation almost everyone had volunteered.
Bryan explained decolonizing education by asking anyone that wanted to join him in a game. In the game he asked everyone to stand up, walk around the room whenever he said “walk” and stop whenever he said “stop.” Then he added the instructions to clap when he said “clap” and to say your name each time he said “name.” For a minute the group followed his instructions.
Then he stopped and told everyone to reverse the instructions. He wanted the audience to stop when he said “walk” and to clap when he said “name”. The participants continued walking around the room, clapping and muttering to themselves, and frequently giggling as they made mistakes.
After Bryan asked everyone to return to their seats, he explained that decolonizing education is largely about unlearning what’s familiar to us. European education typically involves a strict routine of classes, assignments, rigid settings and schedules. This routine has been forced upon countries like Ecuador by colonists, but it isn’t the only valid way of educating. Bryan calls this idea “Pluriversity.”
He asked the audience to take a full minute to think quietly about their own educational history. Each person then shared parts of their experience that connected to Bryan’s descriptions of imposed systems of learning. Bryan explained that these colonial education systems are not only imposed, but ineffective. He said that education systems need to arise naturally within each culture to be useful to the people engaging with them.
Bryan spoke of his intense belief that Pluriversity is the way of the future. When asked by an audience member about the global progress towards a wider variety of education systems, Bryan responded, “what I can say is, it’s going to happen.”
Bryan lastly described the process of reaching Pluriversity as walking across a bridge. In front of the audience, he demonstrated how most people are used to walking. Then, he mimed walking across the bridge a second way, by stumbling, twirling, and rolling to the other side of the room using his hands and feet. He said how unnatural and ridiculous it might look to us, but that we shouldn’t dismiss it. He said that part of this process is unlearning those reactions on our way to a better future, adding “we have to get comfortable on that bridge.”
