The Shadow of Hope: Reconciliation and Imaginal Pedagogies

Abstract

By exploring the extreme demands that a reconciliation agenda places upon the imagination, this chapter maps and evaluates the possibilities for mythopoetic pedagogies. Such a move aims to work as a provocation for teachers in formal education systems and for cultural workers. Various calls to imagination within the literature of reconciliation are highlighted: the challenges faced in a double process of acknowledgement and forgiveness; the complexities of different ways of knowing/valuing and imagining in intercultural dialogue; the struggle over memory and how to imagine responsibility, shame, and grief; imagination’s role in a reconciliation pedagogy; and re-imagining identity in postcolonial contexts. Mythopoetic pedagogies that lie outside the post-Enlightenment paradigm are introduced alongside dominant western critical theories of pedagogy and imagination. This is crucial due to the devaluation and marginalization of mythopoetics within the philosophies and pedagogies of modernity and postmodernity. The chapter includes a brief reflection upon some personal experiences in the practice and organization of a mythopoetic pedagogy, in order to develop an understanding of its limitations and possibilities when applied to a reconciliation agenda.