Pedagogy of the Moment: a Journey on Becoming Wide-Awake

Abstract

Experientially framed around Malcolm’s learning experience in Antarctica, the paper seeks to understand elements that are central to educational moments where a high student becomes wide-awake. To become wide-awake, we are arguing, is to become ontologically open to the possibility, imagining, and potentiality of radical transformation through one’s acknowledged agency. Exploring the convergence of four pedagogical tributaries — cosmological, place, relational, and hermeneutic — we unpack how this moment makes Malcolm see the world anew. The paper concludes that a pedagogy of the moment — a ‘moment’ not in its momentary-time-sense, that is, as an in passing moment, but a performative moment that is deeply situated in time, history and place — is a necessary aim of education in a world thrust into unknowns by global sustainability challenges.