The AlternativesAre activities and initiatives, concepts, worldviews, or action proposals by collectives, groups, organizations, communities, or social movements challenging and replacing the dominant system that perpetuates inequality, exploitation, and unsustainabiity. In the GTA we focus primarily on what we call "radical or transformative alternatives", which we define as initiatives that are attempting to break with the dominant system and take paths towards direct and radical forms of political and economic democracy, localised self-reliance, social justice and equity, cultural and knowledge diversity, and ecological resilience. Their locus is neither the State nor the capitalist economy. They are advancing in the process of dismantling most forms of hierarchies, assuming the principles of sufficiency, autonomy, non-violence, justice and equality, solidarity, and the caring of life and the Earth. They do this in an integral way, not limited to a single aspect of life. Although such initiatives may have some kind of link with capitalist markets and the State, they prioritize their autonomy to avoid significant dependency on them and tend to reduce, as much as possible, any relationship with them. Project – known by its initials as TAP – is an international and geographically diverse network of progressive academics, union members, civil society activists, and social movement participants concerned with building a global collective critical voice-oriented towards transformative education and societal change. At the moment we have about 25 core members, hundreds of people have signed our Statement (including Noam Chomsky, please sign!) and attended some of our activities, and TAP is in our second year of operation.
We had our launch webinar in January 2021 at the World Social Forum and participated again in a webinar at this year’s WSF. In February 2022, we organized a two-hour webinar concerned with education, social, and economic alternatives in February 2022 in conjunction with other leading organizations, with over 100 participants entitled: “TAP on TAPAS: The Alternatives Project on There are Plenty of Alternatives!”
At each of the 2021 and 2022 annual meetings of the Comparative and International Education Society we organized about 15 panels under the special track we developed titled “21st Century Socialism and Education: Global Alternatives to Patriarchy, Racial Capitalism, Militarism, and Climate Change.” TAP members have been working with the global umbrella 32 million member teachers union, Education International, whose newest campaign, Teach for the Planet, is to help its member unions develop responses to the climate crisis. TAP worked with EI's capacity-building team to lead one of the workshops in their Teach for the Planet training program to launch the campaign. Following that meeting, TAP organized a session on Climate Change and Education for the Comparative International Education Society annual meeting. TAP has also been working with the Global Student Forum which is the global umbrella of student unions and organizations of second-level and third-level education from more than 120 countries and territories of the world on the organization of seminars and online events.
Most recently, we are collaborating on developing webinars under the title "Learnings for Alternative Futures" with partners Global Tapestry of Alternatives; WEAll Wellbeing Economy Alliance; Educere Alliance; PeDAGoG; Ecoversities; and Radical Ecological Democracy.