An Autobiographical Narrative towards Critical Practitioner Inquiry and a Counter Hegemonic Southern Network

This paper is an autobiographical narrative to demonstrate how educational practices and ideas travel through time. It demonstrates how pedagogy based on solidarity and counter hegemonic ideas combined with scholastic perspectives build coherent practices in different social contexts. The work as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher in Sweden created an experiential and scholastic foundation for a critical pedagogical perspective that was further developed in the global South. The colonial spectres are still haunting the capitalist development paradigm as a cure against poverty and so called backwardness. Furthermore, the time when education was seen as an emancipatory activity has now been replaced by the entrepreneurial saints of individualism and marketizations. In spite of the present hegemonic perspectives there is room for counter hegemonic thinking and pedagogical practices struggling for a re-emancipatory and re-enlightening vision of pedagogy. Critical Practitioner Inquiry (CPI) is one such torch in the darkness. CPI as a situationally relevant and critical version of action research was moulded in the context of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa in the 1980s. It was further developed after Namibia's independence in 1990, transferred to Ethiopia after 2002, applied in Lao PDR during the years up to 2011, and recently adapted to the situation in Afghanistan. The CPI concept has been developed and adapted to situations at hand still being faithful to its basic idea of a critical perspective and solidarity. CPI can thereby avoid the dogmatic and taken for granted approaches that commonly are the characteristics of western policy ensembles exported to the global South.