Radical Pedagogy: Orientations for the Near Future

(1) Kim Holflod

(1) Associate Professor, University College Copenhagen / Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University - Corresponding author: kimh@kp.dk / kimh@edu.au.dk (ORCID)

Abstract:

This paper explores radical pedagogy as a future-oriented, imaginative, and transformative educational stance that responds to the cascading complexities of our time. The paper discusses pedagogy as a vital site for reclaiming social imagination and cultivating alternative, desirable futures. In response to what has been described as a contemporary crisis of imagination, radical pedagogy is framed as an emerging, plural, and collective practice. Drawing on critical and speculative traditions, the paper discusses four interconnected orientations that might shape radical pedagogies for the near future: transversal collaborations, playful pedagogies, relational attunement, and rebellious hope. These orientations offer pathways for reconfiguring educational practices toward more profound collectivity, relationality, and sustainability. Rather than providing prescriptive methods, the paper invites diverse partners, including educators, creatives, and civic actors, to engage in shared inquiry into how pedagogy can be reimagined as a collaborative and transformative force. In doing so, it contributes to the expanding body of work that seeks to articulate pedagogy and education not just as preparation for the future, but as a lived, experimental, and imaginative practice of world-making both in the present and the future.

Keywords: radical pedagogy, social imagination, transversality, playfulness, relational education

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1. Pedagogy at the Edge of Now

When we think about the future, we often do so through practical, near-term concerns: remembering to buy groceries tomorrow, getting the kids to kindergarten or school on time, preparing talking points for next week's meeting, or setting resolutions for the coming year. These moments, though seemingly mundane, reveal a fundamental human orientation toward the future. We contemplate what could be, what should be, and what we hope for. And why shouldn't we? Without such future-oriented reflection and imagination, our ability to act purposefully in the present diminishes. The children are late for school, there is nothing to eat for dinner, and the conversation with our manager misses what matters most.

To navigate the complexity of contemporary life, we need both a short-term and a long-term perspective. This applies not only to our daily routines and aspirations but also to how we envision and engage with pedagogy and education. We must cultivate our capacity to imagine proximate futures, dream of alternative near-future possibilities, and critically relate to distant futures, both those that are plausible and possible, and those that are desirable. Education, then, becomes not only a domain of knowledge transfer and achievement but a space where social imagination can flourish. This paper begins by connecting contemporary crises of imagination with radical pedagogy, leading to four orientations for radical pedagogy and education: transversal collaborations, playful pedagogies, relational attunement, and rebellious hope – as inspirations for rethinking and debating pedagogy now and in the near future.

2. Crisis of Imagination

Contemporary thinkers, such as Geoff Mulgan (2020), argue that we are living through a crisis of imagination – a waning of our individual and collective capacity to envision alternative futures. This erosion of social imagination stems from multiple forces: the rise of individualism, the dominance of instrumental rationality, the marginalisation of imaginative inquiry, and the disillusionment following failed utopian projects. Additionally, the overwhelming complexity of global systems, ecological, technological, political, and economic, has led to a sense of detachment and powerlessness.

These dynamics are compounded by prevailing assumptions that existing systems are both natural and inevitable, making it difficult to imagine alternatives. Yet this is precisely what our moment demands. The grand challenges we face, such as climate change, algorithmic governance, social fragmentation, welfare crises, and educational injustice, require bold, creative, and collective responses. They are polycrises that transform the role of education (EU, 2023). This calls for a renewed embrace of imaginative, utopian thinking: not as a naïve quest for perfection, but as a speculative and generative orientation that helps us envision and strive for more just, sustainable, and prosperous futures.

In this context, pedagogy must be(come) radical. That is, it must be willing to examine root causes, resist reproductive logics, and create space for alternative imaginaries to emerge. Radical pedagogy responds to the crisis of imagination by cultivating the capacity to desire and design otherwise. As the philosopher Miguel Abensour (1999) reminds us, utopias are not just about projecting ideal futures; they are about educating and awakening desire itself: to desire better, to desire more, and, above all, to desire otherwise (pp. 145–146). Radical pedagogy reclaims this desire, not as a private longing, but as a collective, affective reasoning capable of disrupting the present and guiding learners and communities towards more imaginative and desirable futures.

3. Radical Pedagogy for the Near Future

In 1999, Timothy McGettigan posed a question that still reverberates: What is radical pedagogy? He discussed radical pedagogy as more than just a critique of educational inequities; it was also a provocation to imagine and enact other futures that best serve both educators and the educated. Today, amidst the cascading crises of the Anthropocene, marked by ecological precarity, social inequality, and epistemic instability, this question gains new urgency. Though the strands of radical pedagogy are diverse, encompassing both political, activist, transformative, and innovative orientations (Fedotova & Nikolaeva, 2015), McGettigan (1999) argues that their underlying emphasis on change interconnects them. It calls for extending our awareness to the near future, asking us to recognise how this precise moment, where we are all present, grows out of the past and seeds the future. Radical pedagogy, here, is anchored in the critical traditions of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and others (Fedotova & Nikolaeva, 2015; Xavier, 2022), yet it also branches into contemporary emerging imaginaries such as hopeful, planetary, and speculative frameworks (Bayne & Ross, 2024; Nørgård & Holflod, 2024a), blending critique with hope and resistance with creativity.

Radical pedagogy is not a fixed doctrine but a dynamic disposition; a sustained commitment to critique, to imagining otherwise, and experimenting with diverse modes of learning and unlearning. It calls educators, learners, artists, theorists, and activists into a collaborative project: resisting inherited systems of power while co-creating pedagogies attentive to the complex urgencies and possibilities of the present and near future. Against this backdrop, four interconnected orientations emerge as vital in revisiting radical pedagogies: transversal collaborations, playful pedagogies, relational attunement, and rebellious hope. These orientations offer generative paths for cultivating diverse and evolving educational practices, where the future is multiple, contingent, and collectively shaped.

4. Four Orientations for Radical Pedagogy

Transversal Collaborations

Transversality provides a lens for understanding pedagogy as fluid, cross-cutting processes that resist fixed categories and disciplinary silos. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti (2019, 2021) and inspired by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, transversality refers to movement across and beyond hierarchical, linear, categorical, or binary structures. Rather than focusing on stable identities or static systems, it foregrounds relationality, emergence, multiplicity and interbeing (Bradley, 2018). In pedagogical terms, transversality positions learning as an entangled, co-constitutive process in which diverse actors, practices, and forms of knowledge shape and reshape pedagogy across education, industry, the public sector, civil society, and the environment. It emphasises how creative, situated interventions can reconfigure both institutions and relationships. Transversality also highlights experimentation and assemblage, supporting learners and educators in collaborating across and with differences without collapsing them, and in resisting fixity by working towards forms of interbeing (Beighton, 2018).

Transversal collaboration poses a substantive educational design challenge. It requires institutions to reconsider and reconfigure their structures and boundaries to foster openness and creativity while considering academic autonomy. Designing for such collaboration involves establishing conditions where new ideas, relations, and forms of co-creation can take shape, including through in-between communities (Bradley, 2018), cross-sector partnerships (Nørgård & Holflod, 2024b), and collaborative practices rooted in care (Scheel et al., 2019). A transversal orientation in pedagogy thus foregrounds responsibility and becoming-with, not only between humans but with technologies, environments, communities, and more-than-human agencies, encouraging educational spaces and futures that are plural, responsive, holistic, and attuned to the complexities of the people and the planet.

Playful Pedagogies

Far from being frivolous, playfulness may be a central mode of radical pedagogy. Following Miguel Sicart (2014), playfulness projects play’s core qualities, such as curiosity, exploration, disruption, and experimentation, into contexts not typically associated with play. In this light, pedagogy becomes playful not through specific “play activities,” but through an attitude of openness, imagination, and affective engagement in how learning and teaching are approached. Play blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, creating shared, liminal spaces for co-creation and collaboration. As Eugen Fink (2016) reminds us, play enables us to grapple with some of the most profound dimensions of human existence: work, love, struggle, and even death, through modes that invite experimentation and transformation. In education, this playful orientation opens possibilities for approaching complexity with emotional depth and creative openness.

Play is not a fixed act but a context-dependent way of being: “It is not what we do, but how we do it” (Nachmanovitch, 2024) – and a way of exploring, reconfiguring and travelling worlds (Sicart, 2023). From this perspective, playfulness becomes a radical and imaginative force in pedagogy, enabling learners and educators to reconfigure relationships, subvert norms, and imagine otherwise. Rather than offering predictable outcomes, playful pedagogies embrace uncertainty and emergence as vital conditions for collective learning and change. In this sense, playfulness in radical pedagogy is not a method, but a disposition, a way of being that resists the instrumentalisation and performativity of contemporary education. It invites care, interdependence, and soulful attunement (Holflod, 2024), making space for plural ways of knowing, being, and becoming. Playful pedagogy cultivates learning environments that are not grounded in control or compliance, but in curiosity, co-imagining, and the shared invention of alternative futures.

Relational Attunement

Viewing pedagogy through relationality means understanding and enacting it as part of a living, dynamic ecosystem, one that includes and acknowledges human and non-human actors, environments, technologies, institutions, and sectors. This perspective foregrounds the profound interconnectedness of educational practices within broader social, cultural, and ecological systems. As Ronald Barnett (2018) argues, the university – like other educational institutions – is always entangled with other (eco)systems, including the economy, the natural environment, and societal institutions. While this highlights structural complexity, a relational view of radical pedagogy also draws attention to the micro-ecologies of teaching and learning: the everyday entwinement of people, materials, spaces, structures, histories, practices, and agencies that shape formal and informal learning environments. This relationality is the radical interdependence of all things (Escobar et al., 2024).

In practice, a relational stance invites both learners and educators to recognise their embeddedness in complex social-ecological systems. It calls for pedagogical experimentation, through exploratory labs, civic engagement, cross-sectoral partnerships, and community-based collaboration, not only to reshape content but to cultivate ecological sensibilities and capacities for just and sustainable coexistence. This resonates with calls for a world-centred approach to education (Biesta, 2022), in which students learn to live in and with a world that imposes limits on what we can desire from it and do with it. For Gert Biesta, this is not a question of responsibility alone, but of freedom: the freedom to take risks, to act unpredictably, even undesirably. It is the “beautiful risk” of education (Biesta, 2014) that students may claim their freedom in ways that diverge from, or even reject, the futures we have imagined for them.

Relational attunement foregrounds the need to understand and enact education not as an isolated practice but as an inherently entangled fellowship with the broader world it both shapes and is shaped by, including the connections of different agencies, e.g., human, technological, and natural (Gravett, 2023). It compels us to traverse and reimagine boundaries, whether disciplinary, professional, sectoral, and institutional, recognising that what happens in education is always influenced by, and influential upon, the social, political, and ecological contexts beyond it. Approaching education in this way calls on us to meet beyond ourselves – as educators, citizens, creatives, innovators, and participants in caring and interdependent futures.

Rebellious Hope

A hopeful orientation towards pedagogy is a rebellious, speculative, forward-dreaming, critically engaged practice rooted in both imagination and transformation, seeking to envision and cultivate educational futures that are not only possible and plausible but deeply desirable. Drawing on utopian and speculative thinkers such as Ernst Bloch (1954/1995), Ruth Levitas (2004, 2013), and Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby (2013), a hopeful pedagogy treats social dreaming as a legitimate, rebellious, and necessary form of inquiry. It invites educators and learners to imagine what pedagogy could become by co-creating visions of the good life and of a flourishing, emancipatory education. This is not about abstract idealism; it is the collective work of making space, within and beyond educational settings, to reimagine the present and pursue alternative futures worth having.

Hope, in this context, is not naïve optimism. It is a critical, rebellious, situated practice that engages with structural injustice while holding space for joy, resistance, and transformative possibility. As musician Nick Cave (2022) reminds us, hope is neither neutral nor easily won; it is demanding and adversarial. Levitas (2004) similarly argues that regarding hope and education, seeing beyond the constraints of the present and into radical futures is vital: “If we do not demand the impossible, all we will get is more of the same” (p. 273). Pedagogies of rebellious hope thus insist on the importance of unsettling the present, and its dominant narratives, to open toward futures that break with inherited limits. In this way, rebellious hope recognises that the future is not a static endpoint but a dynamic orientation, always multiple, something lived, felt, and enacted through everyday educational practices. By engaging with the utopian dimension of education, we cultivate not only the imagination but also the courage and capacity to work toward alternative, more just, and desirable futures that reject apathy and embody vibrant communities and radical hope for bettering the world (through pedagogy) and its futures (Nørgård & Holflod, 2024a).

5. Imagining Radical Pedagogies

Radical pedagogy, as proposed here, is not a fixed method or ideology but an evolving constellation of practices, dispositions, and imaginaries that respond to the urgencies and possibilities of our present and near future. It embodies resistance, creativity, and diversity, aiming to disrupt inherited structures of knowledge, power, and responsibility – and to propose new ones that are plural, co-created, and contingent.

Extending beyond traditional educational boundaries, radical pedagogy invites collaboration across diverse voices and sectors, including creatives, artists, poets, educators, communities, practitioners, NGOs, researchers, policymakers, private-sector innovators, activists, and members of civic society. Engaging such a broad constellation of participants recognises that education is deeply entangled with cultural, creative, social, political, and ecological systems. That partnerships across the creative, cultural, educational, political, and civic sectors are vital to reimagine and reconfigure the world as a public good (Nørgård & Holflod, 2024b). Transforming education in significant ways – as dwelled on here – requires transversal engagements that break down disciplinary and institutional silos; relational attunement that situates learning within living, interconnected systems; playful approaches that foster experimentation, curiosity, and creativity; and hopeful orientations that sustain rebellious optimism and the courage to envision radically different futures. Together, these orientations illustrate pedagogies that are responsive, radical, and capable of navigating the complexities and uncertainties of our time.

This paper does not seek to provide a conclusion. Instead, it offers an opening: a call to educators, scholars, creatives, and activists across diverse sectors to engage in a collective inquiry into what pedagogy can become. In a time marked by intersecting (poly)crises and uncertain futures, radical pedagogy opens up spaces to dream aloud, think and act collectively, and foster more just, vibrant, and thriving worlds.

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Comment 1

This is an article that discusses the future of pedagogy, which points out the current situation and causes of inertia in pedagogy, and proposes Timothy Mcgettigan's thinking on radical pedagogy combined with the criticism of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and others to discuss the possibility that radical pedagogy can stimulate the vitality and desire of education and society in the future. Then, it analyzes the four concerns of radical pedagogy, and emphasizes its practical and social characteristics while explaining the democratic nature of this teaching method and edutainment. It also shows that this education method is open and change-oriented, and will not become a new fixed model like the traditional education model, so in this sense it also coincides with the radical tone of RC magazine.

To a certain extent, this article gives pedagogy a utopian development possibility and reform suggestions, so it also arouses my interest in in-depth exploration of the main concepts of the article at the academic level, such as its source, native context and application context. And are there any teaching cases that have made corresponding changes? Perhaps due to space considerations, the author did not discuss the above, but of course I am also very much looking forward to the publication of this article and the subsequent output of related topics.

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