Contribution short abstract

AIBIA’s field school in rural Southern Italy uses critical reimaginative theory to turn inner areas into living laboratories. Students learn with communities, control their own learning paths, and practice educational democracy as a concrete pedagogy of hope.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution introduces AIBIA’s work in rural Southern Italy as an experiment in critical reimaginative pedagogy from the margins. Rather than treating inner areas and postcolonial regions as “left behind,” we approach them as living laboratories where people already quietly practice alternative ways of organizing economies, ecologies and social life under precarious conditions.

Our field schools invite students to learn with communities rather than simply about them. Students encounter “everyday economies” through provocative encounters with small producers, subsistence households, neo-rural projects, and community initiatives, then translate these encounters into grounded analyses and proposals for alternative futures. Built around what we call critical reimaginative theory, the pedagogy moves beyond critique towards reimagining and prefiguratively implementing alternatives: doing, reflecting, reimagining, and implementing in iterative cycles.

If critical reimaginative practice is the method, the core pedagogical shift lies in how control over learning outcomes is redistributed to students, creating a form of educational democracy. Facilitators place them in provocative situations; students then choose which moments move them, make sense of these encounters on their own terms and move their work in directions that interest them, thickly describing those situations, analyzing them, and critically reimagining alternatives. Educational democracy – and therefore pedagogies of hope – lie in how learners themselves exercise power over the direction, meaning and consequences of their learning, and how they choose to address wider crises important to them. Through this practice of critical reimagining, they reconceptualize their world on their own terms, rather than being taught about alternatives from above.