Page - 16 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

16 REfLECTIvE COsMOPOLITANIsM This last characterization of cosmopolitanism as a method and process is especially helpful in understanding cosmopolitan engagement as an educational ideal. It is to see cos- mopolitanism as an orientation, a way of negotiating the world, rather than as a concrete identity.8 The promise of philosophical inquiry in a community of inquiry, then, lies in its embodi- ment of this cosmopolitan ideal. It provides an educational method for generating “a social reality of immanent possibilities” through which students are able to develop the capacity to reflect in a critical, creative, and caring way on the multiple, fluid, and interactive nature of the social reality in which they live. Through such activity, children are able to reconstruct society as a new form of cosmopolitan community in which those at risk of exclusion belong as full members, and through which all children can reconstruct their identities through a transaction between self, other, and world based on a ‘reflective loyalty to the known and openness to the new.’ By approaching cosmopolitanism as an orientation and method, the center-periphery model of society is also transformed. Diversity is no longer on the outside, and commonal- ity on the inside, whereby ‘difference’ places you at risk of exclusion. Once society is seen as a set of interactions rather than a defined space, then ‘occupying’ the public realm can be reconfigured to signify multiple overlapping spheres of engagement – this in turn means the social whole will be constituted by multiple overlapping social spheres or communities, and that hybrid complex of multiply-informed identities are the norm. Global forces interact with local forces in a way that will be multiple and overlapping with permeable and fuzzy – “no clear lines can be drawn between inside and outside, the internal and the external”.9 boundaries, and individual and group identities will be mixed and overlapping rather than homogenous. Such cosmopolitanism engagement will involve a process of problematization, pluralisation, and developmental change whereby the very act of explaining oneself to others constitutes an act of translation through which it becomes possible to open oneself to incorporating an ele- ment of another’s culture into one’s own, thereby giving rise to the possibility of a third culture – a space of possibility between the particular identities of those present that contains new emer- gent possibilities for the group as a whole.10 Competencies addressed in this curriculum This curriculum aims to provide a specific understanding of cosmopolitanism: reflective loyalty with a local and reflective openness to novelty and difference. At the same time, this approach has to modify the way we address the core problems of multicultural coexistence: personal identity, relationships between local and global, relationships between the individual and the community, customs and traditions, human rights, justice, and truth. Reflecting about these problems —in the context of a community of philosophical inquiry which accepts cosmopolitanism as a frame of mind— requires the development of myriad cognitive and affective competencies that are the heart of this curriculum. From amongst the competences that appear in this curriculum, we want to especially emphasize those that are foundational to the basics tenets of this proposal. 8 For example, as described by Hansen and Delanty. 9 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, p. 7. 10 Ibid.