This talk will look at the limits of modern education in equipping students with the capacities and dispositions to address wicked global challenges and to navigate volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

It will ask what kind of education can achieve the following three things: 

1. prepare different generations to tackle the wicked challenges of our time, including unprecedented complex dilemmas and also disasters of our own making that we will have to face together;

2. compel us to do the kindest and most responsible things for each other and the land at all times, especially in times of crises and polarization; and

3. calibrate our internal compass towards sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility in a culture (of late modernity) that often promotes and rewards the opposite.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is a professor at the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, the David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education, and is the interim director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Professor Vanessa Andreotti’s research examines historical and systemic inequalities in reproduction patterns and how these limit or enable possibilities for collective existence and global change.

She is one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research collective (decolonialfutures.net), whose work is the basis of her latest book Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism.