Polymodernity
Meaning and Hope in a Complex World
Polymodernity according to Lene Rachel Andersen at Nordic Bildung
Polymodernity combines four cultural codes: Indigenous (hunter-gatherer and agricultural Stone Age, Traditional (Bronze and Iron Ages), Modern, and Post-Modern.
Each of those four cultural codes entail important knowledge about what it means to be human. Experiences, realizations, and accumulated wisdom that we need now and in the future.
Polymodernity was previously named metamodernity, but it constantly got confused with metamodernism, so Nordic Building changed the name.
According to EduSynthesis this is an important corrective to metamodern theory and praxis which tends to neglect the educational resources of traditional and indigenous Worldviews in focusing almost exclusively on the mediation of the modern and postmodern
Cultural codes with metamodernism
Cultural codes with polymodernity
Notes on the Book Polymodernity
The world is changing and becoming more complex.
Polymodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a more complex way, as it integrates indigenous, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern cultural codes.
Indigenous culture can provide a connection to nature that we have lost and which re-introduces the circularity that we need to solve the climate crisis etc. Premodern culture provided strong moral guidance in the shape of what we today call religion; we need a shared moral compass and ways to share and discuss moral norms in our societies; religion is an aspect of our spiritual life that we need in order to be fully human. Modernity gave us equal rights and opportunities, democracy, science, and the obligation to doubt and think. Postmodernism allows us to see ourselves, our culture, and our civilization from the outside and deconstruct them to study their parts and their inner structures.
We need all of this to create meaning and hope and viable solutions in the 21st century.
Understanding the difference between metamodernity and metamodernism which resulted in the change of name to Polymodernity.
What is Nordic Bildung as a contemporary Educational Philosophy?
Zak Stein on Comenius and Education in a Time Between Worlds
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